Developments in Object Relations

Controversies, Conflicts, and Common Ground

Lavinia Gomez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780415629188
• eBook ISBN: 9781315316628
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Developments in Object Relations provides a highly accessible account of how British Object Relations developed in the second half of the twentieth century, focusing on the generation who took up where Klein and Winnicott left off. Complementing and building on its predecessor, An Introduction to Object Relations, it gives an overview of the development of Object Relations with special reference to the Independent and Kleinian traditions.

An introductory chapter defines the key features of Object Relations. The emergence of Object Relations is is then described theoretically from some of Freud's papers and clinically from the controversial work of Sandor Ferenczi. Similarities and divergences between Kleinian and Independent approaches are considered in detail through the close examination of the work of a key practitioner from each approach, and other significant contributions. Gomez brings clarity to a complex field, discussing what is powerful and problematic about the two main strands in British psychoanalysis. Kleinian and Independent approaches are consistently compared and contrasted, so that readers can develop a clear idea of each. Rather than preferring one to the other, they are presented as different approaches to what is fundamental in psychoanalysis. Chapters on Bion and Masud Khan bring the work of each tradition to life in a fascinating and informative way. Gomez concludes by summarising the claim of psychoanalysis to offer a new way of understanding human reality, particularly useful for readers interested in her second book, The Freud Wars.

Developments in Object Relations will be of great help to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists who work psychoanalytically, particularly those in the process of training, those who have recently qualified and those who are rethinking their position on the different, strongly-held views they encounter. This book is particularly timely when psychoanalytic approaches are under attack from treatments claiming to offer quicker and easier solutions.

Chapter 1
Introduction

The emergence of Object Relations

Psychoanalysis became established in Britain early in the twentieth century. Ernest Jones worked with the British Medical Association to facilitate its recognition as a valid medical treatment and set up the London Psycho-Analytical Society in 1913. This was composed largely of non-practising members of the public with an interest in the field. The British Psychoanalytical Society arose out of this in 1919, welcoming men and women members from medical and non-medical backgrounds but with stricter conditions of membership than its parent body. Shortly after, Jones established the Institute of Psychoanalysis as an administrative and training body, together with a clinic offering subsidised psychoanalytic treatment. The International Journal of Psychoanalysis was published from 1920, and The International Library of Psychoanalysis in 1921. By the early 1920s there was thus a solid platform from which the Society’s work could be developed.

In the decade preceding the Second World War, however, a crisis was building up. Following Nazi attempts to extinguish psychoanalysis as a ‘Jewish science’, a number of Central European analysts emigrated to America and the UK. Several came to London, including Melanie Klein in 1926 and Sigmund Freud and his family in 1938. With the outbreak of war in 1939 and the death of Freud a mere three weeks later, a period of open conflict in the British Psychoanalytical Society erupted. Controversy centred on the impact of the new Kleinian thinking on the established Freudian group. While some of the Society’s members were excited by Klein’s radical new ideas, others denounced them as a gross and misguided departure from Freudian orthodoxy. The presence of Anna Freud, newly bereaved and with her own very different approach to psychoanalysis with both children and adults, made for discussions which were personally as well as theoretically charged. Melitta Schmideberg, Klein’s daughter, became involved in the controversies when she arrived in London in 1933. Her views, and especially those of her analyst, Edward Glover, diverged increasingly from her mother’s. Schmideberg and Glover were not inclined to mince their words and became Klein’s most outspoken critics.

It was as though the external conflict was being mirrored in the London psychoanalytic world, its members agonising over whether psychoanalysis would even survive the war. London was traumatised by the blitz, there was a scarcity of patients, and those analysts who remained in London and kept the Society going resented colleagues leaving for safer parts. In an attempt to address the divisions a series of ‘Controversial Discussions’ was initiated in London during the 1940s (see King and Steiner 1991). The British School of Object Relations emerged from these.

The points of dispute focused on the disparities between Kleinian and Freudian thinking. These held implications for the official stance of the British Psychoanalytical Society with regard to theoretical outlook, clinical practice and the teaching of trainees, and for who held power in the organisation. Their differences mainly involved their respective views of child development and destructiveness. The Freudians saw Eros and the Death Drive as psychobiological urges impelling psychical life, directed towards increasing integration on the one hand and progressive dissolution on the other. Klein reconceptualised the drives in terms of human relations, as love and hate, leading the Freudians to accuse her of confusing descriptive with conceptual terms. They also disagreed with the centrality of phantasy in the Kleinian framework and with her concept of innate internal figures. Her descriptions of imagined violent attacks on the internal mother disturbed them, and they doubted whether very young infants had the mental capacity for such sophisticated emotions as envy, as Klein maintained. Communication was hampered by key terms carrying different shades of meaning to the different parties, adding to the already toxic mix of professional and personal dynamics.

Clinically, Klein homed in on the patient’s most pressing anxieties, expressed through unconscious phantasy, while her Freudian colleagues aimed to foster positive relations before venturing into more difficult territory; and unlike the Freudians, Klein sought to interpret all clinical material in terms of the transference relationship. With so much disagreement about Klein’s most important concepts and techniques, there was particular objection to children being exposed to such a controversial approach. Klein had developed her play technique as a direct parallel to adult free association, enabling her to use the same principles in the analysis of children as with adults. Her rigorous here-and-now transference interpretations centred on the aggressive or sexual impulses causing the most immediate anxiety. Anna Freud, on the other hand, worked with children through a modified approach based on kindly guidance and explanation. She thought the child’s real dependence on his parents prevented the development of transference.

The society did its best to contain the conflicts without the organisation disintegrating. The outcome was the formation of separate groupings in the Society. There were the Freudian¹ or Viennese group, with Anna Freud as its main proponent, and the ‘Kleinists’, or Kleinians, with Klein as their leader. The Kleinian group originally included Winnicott, Heimann and Bowlby, but only for a short time; they were unable to accept some of its core ideas. They joined the largest group, composed of analysts who did not wish to belong to either faction, known as the ‘Middle Group’. This mainly comprised the mostly British analysts who had belonged to the Society before the discussions took place, retaining the typically Anglo-Saxon attitudes of pragmatism and flexibility. They had already contributed work on infant psychology and development, which stood as a background to the work of both Freud and Klein (e.g. Middlemore 1941; and see King and Steiner 1941: 240, 262 fn. 15). The Middle Group hoped to mediate between the other two sections to keep communication open and reach some compromise. This proved unworkable, and as the group became more organised it was renamed the ‘Independents’. Its members sought to have neither an internal hierarchy nor a set theoretical position, remaining open to thinking from different sources. They took a more ‘independent’ attitude towards defined texts and tenets than members of the other two groups. As Winnicott gained increasing influence he became the de facto leader of the Independent school.

Like many of the Freudians, the Independents abhorred the idea of primary destructiveness and envy. They also envisaged ego/object structures developing through responsive care from a state of primary narcissism. If, as Winnicott reminds us, an infant cannot exist without such care, can we identify an infant psyche distinct from the quality of care in the early weeks? It is this which shapes the individual subject that the infant becomes; the ‘good-enough’ mother enables him to develop in a healthy way.

This arrangement of three distinct groupings enabled the society to remain as a single organisation, and the formal ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’² on which it was based was only abandoned comparatively recently. The Independents continue to take up concepts from other approaches as they see fit but eschew any idea of an innate destructive drive. By contrast, it is less common for Kleinians to make use of non-Kleinian concepts. The Contemporary Freudians, meanwhile, take material from the other two approaches into their own mode of work, based on the ego as a system rather than on object relations. This means that they do not belong in a book focusing on the British School of Object Relations. The same applies to other psychoanalytic approaches, such as Attachment Theory, Ego Psychology, Existential Psychoanalysis and Self Psychology. Although a number of these include aspects of Object Relations in their overall approach, internal and external subject-object relations are not central to their conception of the psyche, and they do not belong to either the Kleinians or the Independents.

What is Object Relations?

Object Relations embraces a spectrum of thinking and practice, from the Kleinian to the Independent, and is defined differently by different people. My own working definition remains broadly the same as it was in the Introduction:

• The psychological person, or personal sphere, is made up of relationships and evolves within a matrix of relationship. A person deprived of this could not realise the potential for relationship: even if they survived physically they would not have the capacity to lead a fully human life.

• The need for relationship is primary: nothing else can replace it. René Spitz (1945) coined the term ‘hospitalism’ for the mental and physical ‘failure to thrive’ seen in infants confined to impersonal institutions, or given insufficient emotional care. This occurred in the Romanian orphanages of the Ceaucescu era, for example.

• Finally, Object Relations thinking is not the same as interpersonal thinking: unconscious processes are fundamental. Object Relations speaks of projection, repression, phantasy, splitting – all essentially unconscious mental concepts. Unconscious material appears in dreams, slips of the tongue, free association and so on. When what was previously unconscious emerges into consciousness, different modes and rules apply.

In summary, then: an Object Relations approach is a British psychoanalytic development in which unconscious relationship is fundamental. As experiencing and social beings we develop in a matrix of relationship; the person is first and foremost a seeker not of pleasure but of relationship. Material needs must be satisfied for our physical survival, but how we relate to ourselves and others is at the core of what makes each of us a human individual.

Preview

The first main chapter of this book, ‘Beginnings’, starts by looking at the developments in psychoanalysis which led to the emergence of Object Relations. In theoretical terms, Object Relations emerged through a range of key papers by Freud and clinically, through the practice of Freud’s younger colleague, Ferenczi. In the following chapter, ‘The Kleinian and Independent Frameworks’, the two schools of British Object Relations, are introduced. Their overall frameworks, similarities and differences are clarified, providing a platform from which readers can engage effectively with the work of the practitioners considered.

There is then a complete chapter on Bion, probably the most influential psychoanalyst apart from Freud and Klein. The subsequent chapter focuses on ‘Further Kleinian Developments’, and we then proceed to the Independent school. As with Bion, a whole chapter is given over to Masud Khan, a fascinating and innovative figure and perhaps the best-known analyst of his day, but shunned in later years because of his flagrant malpractice. Following this, the work of two other important Independent practitioners is discussed.

The book ends with a chapter on ‘Approaches to Practice’, leaving the reader with a vivid sense of each modality. Leading Kleinian and Independent analysts give an explication of their own approach, together with how each viewed the other. Papers by Bion and Khan bring their respective clinical styles to life, illustrating issues raised in the first part of the chapter and in the book as a whole. A general discussion sums up the Kleinian and Independent approaches overall.

Finally, an Appendix is included which sketches out the main arguments of The Freud Wars, mentioned several times in this book, for interested readers. The appendix explores the ground of psychoanalysis, at the same time introducing a philosophical evaluation. Taking the controversies in the New York Review of Books during the 1990s as a starting point, The Freud Wars examines how psychoanalysis and its central concept, the unconscious, can be accounted for: it becomes clear why there is no common agreement as to whether it is a scientific or a humanities subject. By investigating Freud’s writings to unearth his philosophical commitments, implicit foundations can be found and constructed which show that psychoanalysis can be seen as a valid area of study which is neither a science nor a humanities subject: it arises from a conceptual point before the mind/body, hermeneutic/scientific distinction is located in Western thought.

Notes

1 The Freudian group later became the ‘Contemporary Freudians’.

2 In fact, the ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ was made between Anna Freud, Melanie Klein and Sylvia Payne, as leading representatives of the three groups.

References

King, P. and Steiner, R., eds (1991) The Freud-Klein Controversies 1941–45, London and New York: Tavistock/Routledge.

Middlemore, M. (1941) The Nursing Couple, London: Hamish Hamilton Medical Books.

Spitz, R. (1945) ‘Hospitalism – An Inquiry into the Genesis of Psychiatric Conditions of Early Childhood’, Psychoanalytic Study of the Child 1: 53–74.

Chapter 2
Beginnings

Theoretical beginnings: Freud (1856–1939)

The enormously wide-ranging and innovative work of Freud means that there is scarcely a serious review of therapeutic thinking that does not have to start with his writing. His thinking can be complex and his writing dense, and because several papers are outlined, this chapter makes more demands on the reader than those that come later; nevertheless, it lays essential ground for the change in Freud’s thinking that led into Object Relations.

Object Relations as a field is widely understood to have commenced with his ground-breaking papers ‘On Narcissism’ (1914, S.E.14) and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ (1915, S.E.14). These are the papers in which he first conceives the psyche (misleadingly translated as ‘mind’) as a group of personal elements relating to each other. At the centre is the ego or ‘I’, an organised dynamic structure made up of a number of interconnecting subjective figures or significant figures. As early as 1914, Object Relations began to take shape as a new conceptualisation of the human psyche based on conscious and unconscious connections within and between people.

Freud’s first attempted theory of the psyche was as close as he could get to an entirely physical account. In his Project for a Scientific Psychology (1950/1895, S.E.1) the psyche is imagined as a quasi-physical apparatus regulating itself through an unknown form of energy. Freud never managed to finish this and appears to have tried to suppress it. However, many of its patterns reappeared in a theoretical work which he began immediately afterwards, The Interpretation of Dreams (1901, S.E.4–5). The centrepiece of this work is chapter 7, ‘The Psychology of the Dream-Processes’, particularly section B (S.E.5: 533–549). It is here that he shifts the physicalistic concepts of the Project to the psychical level. He uses the same sequence of steps as in the Project to map out how the stimuli impacting on the sense-organs move from the mental level of perception to straightforwardly physical motor activity – from perception to thought to action. In the metapsychological portions (the bedrock theoretical level) of this long work he likens the psyche to a ‘compound microscope or a photographic apparatus’ (S.E.5: 536) which gives us pictures which are not physically real, but which can be treated as representing something material. He begins to clarify his conception of the psychical zone as the unconscious yet somatic region between the physical and the conscious. He describes psychical processes as unitary, but with mental and physical aspects (1940a, S.E.23).

Freud envisages two forms of energy or drives (mistranslated as ‘instincts’): the self-preservative drives, such as hunger and aggression, and the sexual drives, which include all forms of social and personal attachment and have the preservation of the species as their aim (S.E.14: 78). Freud divides psychical processes into conscious, pre-conscious and unconscious systems. The unconscious levels of mind have their own laws and ways of acting: in the regions of the dream and the neurotic symptom there is no negation, no contradiction, no differentiation between thought and reality. One layer of unconsciousness consists of that which was once conscious and may become so again – the repressed unconscious. The other is the unconscious ‘proper’, ‘primal phantasies’ which have never and will never become conscious, but which shape and colour the upper layers of awareness. Primal phantasies are inherited collective myths in the form of rudimentary portrayals of notions such as the mother’s body (internal and external), parental intercourse and castration (ibid. 269). It is these that promote the psychic organisation that is typical of human beings, regardless of experience.

This theoretical framework, known as ‘Libido Theory’, acts as the backdrop for his later version of the Life and Death drives (Beyond the Pleasure Principle, 1920, S.E.18) and the development of his tripartite structure of the psyche (The Ego and the Id, 1923, S.E.19). As noted above, a framework for an Object Relations approach begins to appear from 1914, within a libido theory context, in ‘On Narcissism’ and ‘Mourning and Melancholia’. It is consolidated in the late ‘Splitting of the Ego in the Process of Defence’ (1940b, S.E.23).

We shall now take a brief look at these papers to see how this view of the psyche developed.

‘On Narcissism: An Intro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Beginnings
• 3 The Kleinian and Independent frameworks
• 4 Wilfred Bion and his development of psychoanalysis
• 5 Further Kleinian developments
• 6 Masud Khan and the British Psychoanalytical Society
• 7 Further Independent developments
• 8 Kleinian and Independent approaches to practice
• Appendix: Foundations for psychoanalysis
• Index