Kohut, Loewald and the Postmoderns

A Comparative Study of Self and Relationship

Judith G. Teicholz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317771135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

In Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns, Judith Teicholz, using the contemporary critique of Kohut and Loewald as a touchstone of inquiry into the current status of psychoanalysis, focuses on a select group of postmodern theorists whose recent writings comprise a questioning subtext to Kohut's and Loewald's ideas. Acutely aware of the important differences among these theorists, Teicholz nonetheless believes that their respective contributions, which present psychoanalysis as an interactive process in which the analyst's own subjectivity plays a constitutive role in the joint construction of meanings, achieve shared significance as a postmodern critique of Kohut and Loewald. She is especially concerned with the relationship - both theoretically and technically -between Kohut's emphasis on the analyst's empathic resonance with the analysand's viewpoint and affect, and the postmodern theorists' shared insistence on the expression of the analyst's own subjectivity in the treatment situation. Her analysis incorporates fine insight into the tensions and ambiguities in Kohut and Loewald, whose work ultimately emerges as a way station between modern and postmodern viewpoints, and herappreciation of Kohut and Loewald as transitional theorists makes for an admirably even-handed exposition. She emphasizes throughout the various ways in which Kohut and Loewald gave nascent expression to postmodern attitudes, but she is no less appreciative of the originality of postmodern theorists, who address genuine lacunae in the thought and writings of these exemplars of an earlier generation. Teicholz's examination of what she terms two overlapping "partial revolutions" in psychoanalysis - that of Kohut and Loewald on one hand and of the postmoderns on the other - throws an illuminating searchlight on the path psychoanalysis has traveled over the last quarter of the 20th century.

PART I
KOHUT’S AND LOEWALD’S WRITINGS AS FINALE TO THE MODERN AND OVERTURE TO THE POSTMODERN

1
THE ONE-HALF AND THREE-QUARTERS REVOLUTIONS

The Shift From Modern to Postmodern in Psychoanalysis

We cannot yet think outside of this tradition of precepts; we do not know what will develop beyond the modern episteme. But we surely know that this episteme, our old ways of thinking, is fast exhausting itself and we know that we desperately need new ways of thinking and acting

—Barnaby Barratt

Trying to capture the physicists precise mathematical description of the quantum world with our crude words and mental images is like playing Chopin with a boxing glove on one hand and a catchers mitt on the other.

—George Johnson

Mr. Sokal invites anybody who feels that physical laws are mere social constructs to defy them by leaping from his 21st story window.

—Edward Rothstein

Elucidating the Postmodern in Psychoanalysis

In The Scientific Revolution, Steven Shapin (1996) equates modernity with the “idea of science as the reliable product of disinterested and dispassionate inquiry [which goes] hand in hand with the idea that such knowledge [can] be a tool for improving the human lot” (quoted in Gottlieb, 1996, p. 28). At this moment in history, no longer attributing to science the capacity to generate “reliable products,” we are facing a crisis of confidence concerning our psychoanalytic “tool for improving the human lot.” This crisis of confidence has engendered in many psychoanalysts an intensive search for alternative tools or methodologies for healing those who come to us for help, even when such concepts as tools or methodologies have fallen into a certain disrepute. Our search, therefore, involves not only a rigorous questioning of all that has been used or taken for granted in the past, but also a questioning of the very process of trying to find new ways of doing and understanding. It is this questioning that I am calling the postmodern.

The psychoanalytic literature has seen a recent upsurge in references to postmodern phenomena (Barratt, 1993, 1995; Mitchell, 1993; Sass, 1995; Aron, 1996; Elliott and Spezzano, 1996; Protter, 1996). In the psychoanalytic context, the term postmodern seems to refer sometimes to aspects of contemporary life and the human condition as we hurtle toward the millenium (Elliott and Spezzano, 1996); sometimes to current developments in art, philosophy, history, and literary or feminist criticism (Sass, 1995); sometimes to the metaphorical reverberations of quantum physics on psychoanalytic theorizing (Sucharov, 1994; Mayer, 1996b); and occasionally to specific trends in psychoanalytic thought and practice that are associated with any of these other experiential phenomena or intellectual disciplines (Mitchell, 1993). Less frequently, individual psychoanalysts identify themselves, or are identified by others, as postmodern analysts (Aron, 1996). In all these uses of the term, postmodern seems to encompass a multitude of meanings, this multiplicity of meanings being a postmodern phenomenon in and of itself.

In this book, my use of the term postmodern refers only to the last two of the foregoing uses: namely, to specific trends in contemporary psychoanalytic thought and practice and to a small group of contemporary analysts whose work in various ways seems to exemplify these trends, whether or not they identify themselves as postmodern or would welcome the term as descriptive of their thinking. The trends in question have broadly to do with a certain critique of previous psychoanalytic theorizing, along with a certain tentative and questioning attitude on the part of analytic writers toward their own theoretical efforts.

Barnaby Barratt (1993) has written a masterful treatise on postmodern thought in the Western world and its implications for psychoanalysis. For Barratt (1995), the term postmodern refers to “an impulse to critique that tries to disclose the limitations, insufficiencies, and distortions of reasoning of the modern episteme from within the monopoly of its epistemics” (pp. 139–140). Barratt proposes that Western thought is in the midst of a revolution in relation to which psychoanalysis has been both “instigator” and “reaction” (p. 137). According to Barratt (1993, 1995), Freud’s early 20th-century notion of the unconscious and the method of free association played a pivotal role in starting a revolution in modern thought: unconscious processes, as expressed in free association, deconstruct and thereby liberate us from the confines of rational thought, its order, and its systems of meaning. Yet in spite of and perhaps because of this “irreducible equivocation and undecidability of meaning” (Barratt, 1995, p. 139), psychoanalysis has spawned multiple systems of meaning, meanings that psychoanalysts, starting with Freud, have read into the free associations of their analysands or have abstracted from the interactions between themselves and their analysands over the course of this century.

Freud himself articulated a multifaceted and complex system of meanings, which he believed were universal and which he interwove into his “discoveries” about the structure of the human psyche and its instincts. But to the extent that Freud imposed order on, and attributed meaning to, the form and content of the unconscious, he was ignoring or even opposing the more radical implications of his own innovation (Barratt, 1993, 1995). From this viewpoint, psychoanalysis has always held within itself the inevitability of its own deconstruction, a deconstruction that can be seen as a liberating source of vitality, even while it reflects and entails a loss: “the loss of a transcendental or foundational point of universal reference by which the diversities of thinking and communication, the plurivocality of human experiences and values, might be commonly anchored or organized as a unity” (Barratt, 1995, p. 137).

I suggest that, starting midway through the 20th century, a different kind of revolution began to get underway and build up momentum, smaller and more confined to psychoanalytic thinking itself, but nevertheless significant in its long-term effects. This mid-century, “part-revolution,” which I will examine here through the writings of Kohut and Loewald, both expressed and influenced the ongoing unraveling of “foundations” that had been begun earlier by Freud’s recognition of the unconscious. This part-revolution questioned many of Freud’s universalist assumptions but offered some universalist or quasi-universalist assumptions of its own. Thus, while its carriers recognized and explicitly acknowledged the cultural-historical limitations of their own perspectives, they did not take the revolution to the radical postmodern position of questioning altogether the possibility of order or shared meaning in human experience. By rejecting important aspects of Freud’s received teachings, and by attempting to place their own ideas in historical perspective, Kohut and Loewald were perhaps precursors to the postmodern “impulse to critique.” But they stopped well short of the postmodern to the extent that they were still able, without epistemological misgivings, to elaborate alternative renderings of what might be primary and universal in human experience and development and to portray develpment and psychopathology in terms of cause-and-effect relationships.

Kohut and Loewald accepted and built on Freud’s concept of the unconscious, but they construed the “content” and “organization” of the unconscious in ways that turned out to be radically different from what Freud believed himself to have “discovered.” Even more significantly, Kohut and Loewald, each in a different way, began to shift psychoanalytic inquiry from an exclusive focus on the interior of the subject as a closed system to a focus on the arena between analytic subject and analyst; they no longer saw either “system” as closed. This shift in the focus of inquiry led to new ways of constructing psychoanalytic meaning: ultimately, Kohut (1959, 1966) and Loewald (1960) placed self and relationship at the center of human motivation and narrative and questioned Freud’s notion of sexual and aggressive drives as the primary organizers of personality, experience, and psychopathology.

Simultaneously with Kohut and Loewald, other psychoanalysts in other parts of the world were launching parallel and overlapping “part-revolutions,” as for example the British Middle or Independent school of psychoanalysis, among which the work of Winnicott stands out as the most compatible with aspects of Kohut and Loewald’s thinking. Even during Freud’s time, however, there had been voices which were discordant with some of his central ideas, voices that spoke of self, culture, or relationship, independent of the drives. These included Sullivan, Fromm, the Balints, Rank, Ferenczi, and Horney, among others. But in many instances these voices were suppressed or cordoned off from mainstream psychoanalysis (Aron, 1996), and some of them are only now enjoying a vigorous revival of interest. Most interestingly, some of the current interest in these previously ignored contemporaries of Freud’s is being expressed by the very analysts whom I term postmodern. In fact, much of what we call postmodern today is profoundly resonant with the thinking of these contemporaries of Freud’s who wished to emphasize aspects of human development and the psychoanalytic situation that Freud chose to downplay or ignore. Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon is the contemporary interest in Ferenczi’s concept of mutual analysis (Aron and Harris, 1993; Aron, 1996).

To explore this protracted, 20th-century revolution toward the postmodern in psychoanalysis, started by Freud and looking very much as if it will continue into the 21st century, I compare in this book central tenets of the work of Kohut and Loewald with salient ideas from the writings of a selected group of contemporary American psychoanalysts who are currently in the process of forging new perspectives. I use the term postmodern—with several caveats both about the choice of label itself and about treating as a cohort—to describe a group of highly individual voices, each of whom has already made a significant and distinctive contribution to the development of psychoanalytic thinking and practice. As mentioned in the introduction, the analysts I have chosen to pay most attention to in this context are Lewis Aron, Jessica Benjamin, Irwin Hoffman, Stephen Mitchell, and Owen Renick. What these individual analysts seem to have in common is a sensitive and thoughtful recognition of the forces at work in the postmodern world and in postmodern thought that are pulling at the fabric of our psyches and our theories. But, for these writers, what seems to go hand in hand with this recognition is a desire and a determination not to yield to the nihilistic undertow of these forces in their work and in their thought.

Most of the new perspectives might be said to fit under a broad umbrella of relational, social-constructivist, or participant-observation theories (Spezzano, 1996), which have both significant convergences and divergences. In some cases, there is also a tentativeness and process quality to their theory-building that may be one of many ways in which they express their postmodern sensibilities. These analysts (Hoffman, 1983, 1991, 1994, 1996; Benjamin, 1988, 1995a, b; Mitchell, 1993, 1996a, b; Aron, 1991, 1992, 1996; Renik, 1993, 1995, 1996) have furthered the revolution in psychoanalysis but for the most part have not taken it beyond the limits of hermeneutics, a philosophical viewpoint that still allows for the construction of shared meanings (Brook, 1995; Steiner, 1995). Thus, to the extent that we can call them postmodern at all, they are moderate postmoderns, as opposed to extreme postmoderns, and perhaps represent only a conservative, as opposed to a radical, revolution. Of course there are many psychoanalysts other than those I have chosen, both mid- and late-20th century, whom I could have used to examine the state of this revolution in analytic thought; but to make the task manageable I must narrow the field by trying to find significant, if not totally representative, theorists. In fact, in the face of today’s plethora of theoretical viewpoints, finding a group of writers who might be representative of a single psychoanalytic trend is an unattainable task. My choice of these particular analysts is therefore necessarily personal and subjective but one I hope serves my purpose well.

The field of hermeneutics studies the principles of interpretation and thereby highlights the possibility of multiple principles of interpretation and of multiple interpretations as well. But beyond hermeneutics lies a postmodern point of implosion: this is a point at which one would approach with “radical seriousness… the possibility that commonalities of understanding should always be treated with suspicion for what they exclude, foreclose, or ‘repress’” (Barratt, 1995, p. 139). At this point of implosion or deconstruction, it can be difficult to grasp why one would undertake to be in or to conduct a psychoanalysis, because the possibilities for the establishment of shared meanings and common understandings seem to have been questioned out of existence. It seems then that there is only the flux of the unconscious, and nothing else. It also seems that there would be little sense in trying to write a book about this or any topic (see also Harvey, 1990; Sass, 1995; Eagleton, 1996), since the writer would not be able to assume sufficient commonality of understanding to imagine a reading audience. But if we accept this line of thought (can there be a “line” of thought when thought is no longer accepted as linear?), we would be giving in to the Talking Heads, who sing: “Stop Making Sense.” One way to express this postmodern dilemma is by asking, How do we permit ourselves to make sense, to ourselves and others, now that we have become aware of how arbitrary, and therefore in some ways false, any sense that we make must necessarily be? Is it really possible for us to do our work, once we undertake to examine and question every assumption? There is a tension in the psychoanalytic air between those who see the postmodern impulse to critique as tending toward chaos and nihilism and those who see it primarily as a challenge to free ourselves (Goldberg, 1990; Barratt, 1993, 1995), and thereby our patients as well, of unnecessary and even harmful constraints.

Actually, Barratt (1993, 1995) goes well beyond suggesting that an embrace of the postmodern will help only the community of analysts and their patients. He suggests that it has significantly been the modern outlook, with its blind faith in science, progress, and the perfectibility of mankind, that has made possible such catastrophes as the Holocaust(s) and the ecological destruction of the planet. In a similar vein, he views the modern concept of identity primarily in terms of foreclosure of alternative lives and selves. These foreclosures get in the way of achieving genuine empathy with others whose identities are different from ours and thus contribute to racial or social divisiveness and to gender polarization. Barratt insists that only by turning away from our modern structures, whether internal or external, and surrendering to a postmodern formlessness can we avoid continuing or repeating some of the worst disasters of the 20th century.

Among the group of analysts whom I call the postmoderns, Hoffman has explicitly expressed a preference to be seen not as a post modern but as a critical realist (Stepansky, 1997, personal communication). Aron (1996) also discusses his view of himself in regard to the postmodern classification. He writes that he wishes to embrace certain aspects of postmodern thinking while rejecting others, and he does this by identifying two contrasting trends within postmodern thought (he credits P. M. Resenau, 1992, with having originated this distinction, which he also acknowledges as being oversimplified). Aron aligns himself only with the more moderate and “affirmative” of these two postmodern trends, which he describes as follows:

The more extreme, skeptical postmodernists tend to be influenced by Continental European philosophers, especially Heidegger and Nietzsche, and emphasize the dark side of postmodernism, despair, the demise of the subject, the end of the author, the impossibility of truth, radical uncertainty, and the destructive character of modernity. The more moderate, affirmative postmodernists tend to be indigenous to Anglo-North American culture and are more oriented to process, emphasizing a non-dogmatic, tentative, and nonideological intellectual practice (p. 25).

By identifying himself and several of his contemporaries as allied with the moderate and affirmative trends in postmodern thought rather than with the radical, Aron suggests that he might more comfortably label himself a “critical modernist” (p. 26) than a “postmodernist” proper. Aron seems to choose this terminology in order to emphasize the perspectival and constructivist possibilities in postclassical thought, while attempting to avoid its nihilistic overtones. In my mind, however, Aron’s and Hoffman’s convergence on the adjective “critical” seems to bring them closer to the radical postmodern realm of Barratt’s (1993) “impulse to critique” than either of these authors might wish. Aron (1996) struggles to maintain a position for himself (as analyst and as writer) somewhere between the now outmoded “rational and unified subject,” on one hand, and the postmodern subject who is “socially and linguistically decentered and fragmented,” on the other (p. 25). He clearly succeeds in maintaining this tension but also seems to be aware of a lurking darkness. Hoffman, likewise, struggles with the polarities: he places the dialectic at the center of his proposed “solution” and thereby urges us to live with a rather postmodern nonresolution.

Barratt (1993, 1995) acknowledges that the radical postmodern critique constitutes a crisis of Western thought, but he welcomes this crisis as an “unlocking” and a liberation from “imprisonment” within a false sense of order and shared meanings. In contrast to Barratt on this point, the individual analysts in my so-called postmodern group struggle to identify common principles of personal experience and relationships that might guide them (and their students, supervisees, and readers) in their work as analysts; at the same time they must avoid falling into the positions that they themselves have criticized: the positions of positing universals, of reifying and “privileging” particular aspects of human experience, or of seeming to claim that their particular viewpoints are the best ones possible, at least for now. The outcome of this struggle cannot now be predicted. At this moment, it may well be impossible to critique modern ways of thinking and being without falling prey to modern ways of thinking and being.

To the extent that, living in this time and place, we cannot avoid recognizing and expressing the postmodern “impulse to critique,” we must ask how it has affected our current understandings of psychoanalytic theory. In general, “the loss of a foundational point of universal reference” (Barratt, 1995, p. 137) has taught us “to approach the history of ideas in any field with a heightened awareness of cultural relativity, the subjectivity of the historian, and the nonlinearity of progress’ (Teicholz, 1998a, p. 267). Mitchell (1993) describes this evolving postmodern approach to theory, for which he sees evidence across all ma...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Absent Authority and Ever-Present Subjectivity of the Author
• Part I Kohut’s and Loewald’s Writings as Finale to the Modern and Overture to the Postmodern
• Part II Kohut’s and Loewald’s Ideas and the Postmodern Response
• Part III Postmodern Trends in Psychoanalysis
• Part IV Kohut, Loewald, and the Postmoderns at Century’s End
• References
• Index