Controversies in Analytical Psychology

Robert Withers, Robert Withers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781134570324
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Forensic Medicine

How can controversy promote mutual respect in analytical psychology?
Analytical psychology is a broad church, and influences areas such as literature, cultural studies, and religion. However, in common with psychoanalysis, there are many different schools of thought and practice which have resulted in divisions within the field. Controversies in Analytical Psychology picks up on these and explores many of the most hotly contested issues in and around analytical psychology.
A group of leading international Jungian authors have contributed papers from contrasting perspectives on a series of key controversies. Some of these concern clinical issues such as what helps patients get better, or how closely analysts should work with the transference. Other contributions focus on the relationship between analytical psychology and other disciplines including evolutionary theory, linguistics, politics and religion. A critical eye is cast over Jungian theories and practices, and a number of questions are raised:
* are they homophobic?
* do they denigrate women?
* do they confuse absolute with narrative truth?
* are the frequency of sessions chosen for political rather than clinical reasons?
Controversies in Analytical Psychology encourages critical thinking on a variety of issues, helping foster dialogue and investigation in a climate of mutual respect and understanding. It will be invaluable for Jungian analysts and psychoanalysts in training and practice and psychotherapists.

CONTROVERSY ONE
Prospects for the Jung/Klein synthesis

Introduction

A tension exists within the world of Jungian analysis between the wish to preserve the distinctive features that constitute our Jungian identity, and the wish to relate to the broader field of psychoanalysis. This tension especially contributes to conflicting attitudes towards the theoretical and clinical formulations of Michael Fordham, who attempted to integrate Jungian thinking with some of the findings of Kleinian and post-Kleinian psychoanalysis.

In this chapter Elizabeth Urban, herself an adherent of Fordham’s ‘developmental school’ of analytical psychology, presents a piece of clinical material with the intention of clarifying certain aspects of Fordham’s work. She is concerned in particular to illustrate how his model can be applied to practice. At the same time she hopes to draw attention to conceptual differences and similarities between his theories and those of Melanie Klein.

The chapter elicits two distinctive responses. On the one hand (or wing) is the classically trained Jungian analyst, Julian David. David points out that Jung thought of himself as a phenomenologist and treated analytic theory with suspicion, despite his fascination with the world of the archetypes and the collective unconscious. David reiterates Jung’s suspicion of theory when he questions the weight that Kleinian theories of early infancy are asked to carry in both Fordham’s model and Urban’s work with her patient, Ruthie. He wonders, for instance, whether Urban’s theoretical preoccupation with infantile issues and with the transference could have blinded her to evidence of sexual material in Ruthie’s analysis. Urban later picks up on this issue in her own response to the commentaries.

The other response to Urban’s chapter comes from the Kleinian analyst Robert Hinshelwood. He too remarks on the apparent absence of sexual material in Ruthie’s analysis, but is far more willing than David to engage in a discussion of theoretical issues. In fact he makes a particular effort to clarify some of the differences and similarities between the Kleinian and Fordhamian theoretical positions, as he understands them. He argues for instance that terms like ‘the self’ and ‘the depressive position’ have become subject to a kind of conceptual drift within the different schools of analysis. As a result of this, the same word can end up referring to different things as it is required to perform different functions within the two theoretical systems.

This could give rise to the pessimistic conclusion that analysts of different orientations are likely to end up thinking they are talking to one another, when in fact they are not. And this probably does sometimes happen. But a careful reading of all four contributions to this chapter could equally yield the opposite conclusion. It is possible for instance to conclude that Hinshelwood and Urban use the term ‘depressive position’ to describe the same phenomenon from an inter- and intrapsychic perspective respectively—rather than to describe completely different phenomena. Likewise it is possible to make clear links between Klein’s concept of self, as ego plus internal objects, and Jung’s concept of self, as ego plus archetypes. On a practical level too it is possible to identify many areas of consensus between the contributors, despite their contrasting attitudes to theory.

(a) With healing in her wings: integration and repair in a self-destructive adolescent

Elizabeth Urban

INTRODUCTION

One of the most important of Jung’s concepts is that of the self. Although he used the term in a number of different ways, the one that predominates is Jung’s definition of the self as the totality of the personality: mind and body, conscious and unconscious, ego and archetypes (Jung, 1971). As a phenomenon, the self is characterized by totality and wholeness, and is the source of meaning. Functionally it is an organizer and integrator, bringing together and structuring the inner world. Because the self is the totality of the personality, it contains or, rather, transcends opposites.

For Jung, meaning and the pressure to become whole are the motivating drives behind development. From his work with adults in mid-life, he conceived development as a process, termed ‘individuation’, in which the individual becomes more deeply and truly himself. Individuation is ongoing; one individuates but is never individuated. Technically, it is a process by which the ego, the centre of perception, time and again confronts conflicting and opposite forces, say between good and evil, or being dependent and being separate. The consequence of the conflict between opposites is—and here is Jung’s optimism (Fordham, 1985a)—a new resolution, symbol or insight arising in the ego. Individuation thus involves the ego and a pair of opposites, and this triangulation is a cornerstone in Jungian understanding of development (Jung, 1955–6, 1959; Fordham, 1985b).

FORDHAM’S MODEL

Drawing upon Jung’s concept of the self, Fordham postulated a primary integrate before birth, which he termed the primary self. Taking Jung’s concept of the self as a psychic integrator and organizer, he added his own original concept, that the primary self divides up, or deintegrates, in order to relate to the environment. The self then assimilates the experience by reintegrating it (Fordham, 1976, 1994).

Freud used the protozoa amoeba as an analogy for the ego (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1973), and it can also be used as a model for the deintegrating and reintegrating primary self. The pseudopod of the amoeba reaches out into the environment and takes in food (deintegration). What is taken in is then assimilated into the nucleated endoplasm (reintegration). The pseudopod does not become detached from the rest of the amoeba, but remains part of it; just as deintegrates remain part of the primary self. If the deintegrate (experience) becomes cut off from the self, then splitting occurs. In other words, according to Fordham, splitting refers to experiences that have pathologically become detached from the self (Fordham, 1987, 1993).

Fordham cites a typical example of deintegration and reintegration in infancy. An infant wakes up from sleep, a state of integration, and relates to the breast during a feed. Following the feed, the baby sleeps again, assimilating, or reintegrating, the milk and the experience (Fordham, 1987). A fuller description, which takes into account the interactive dimension of Fordham’s model, would be as follows. The infant wakes from a state of integration, having an archetypal predisposition towards that which fills his need (cf. Bion’s preconception (Bion, 1962)). He gives signals, such as crying, to his mother. The mother takes these signals into herself, does something with them, and then responds to her baby, such as putting him to the breast. The baby feeds, and takes in not only the milk but something of the mother’s way of feeding and responding. In assimilating the milk and the experience, the baby adds something of his own, such as meaning, the way the mother added something of her own, such as alpha function, when she took in the baby’s signals. What is done within the baby is the result of actions of the self. I shall return to this.

The organizing functions of the self differ from those of the ego. It is the self that accounts for the overall, archetypally shaped unfolding of the personality, and for the organization of the infant’s personality. However, infants also exhibit rapidly fluctuating states, which Fordham understands as evidence of the fragile and unstable infant ego. There are bits of ego at birth, because early experiences (deintegrates) include bits of perception or awareness. Only in the course of development, that is, as the self deintegrates and reintegrates, do they coalesce into a stable ego.

The unfolding of the personality proceeds in surges, which can be understood as periods of massive deintegration. The findings of experimental researchers indicate that surges within the first year occur at birth, at about two months, to a lesser degree at three to five months, and again at ten to twelve months (Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 1980; Trevarthen and Marwick, 1986).

I should now like to focus on three corollaries of Fordham’s postulate of a deintegrating and reintegrating primary self, which pertain to whole and part objects and the depressive position. I shall attempt to expand upon each by drawing upon infant studies.

FIRST COROLLARY: WHOLE OBJECTS PRECEDE PART OBJECTS

For Fordham, the primary self begins before birth. Unlike Freud’s primary narcissism with its libidinous and destructive energies, the energy of the primary self is neutral. Interaction between archetypally (biologically) determined expectations and the intra-uterine environment produces the first objects, which Fordham terms ‘self objects’ (Fordham, 1994). These are pre-image and pre-symbol, and, as I understand them, are what Alvarez is describing when she refers to the pre-objects of autistic children (Alvarez, 1992).

Self objects are imbued with the self, that is, with feelings of wholeness, at-oneness, altogetherness, together-with-me-ness. At the beginning of life, these qualities pervade experiences, thus creating states of fusion via the processes of projective and introjective identification, early processes that initially are probably very close to one another. Foetal swallowing provides a picture of how the experience of being at one with that which one is inside (projective identification) can be very close to that of being at one with that which one has inside (introjecitive identification). According to Milakovic, the foetus ‘at will’ swallows amniotic fluid in order to regulate the imbalance of fluids in its body (Milakovic, 1967). It is easy to imagine that, because what provides relief is of minimum texture and the same temperature as the foetus, what envelops and what is taken in is experienced by the foetus as being part of itself.

After birth, early feeds (deintegrations) are typified by the infant’s total absorption in the experience, eyes closed, body still, and mouth sucking rhythmically, as if the breast were the whole of his universe and he was giving himself entirely to it. Visual, aural and tactile aspects of the mother become incorporated into the wholeness characterizing early self objects. From the observer’s point of view, the baby is relating to parts of the mother, but from the infant’s point of view, the part is the whole (Fordham, 1987; Astor, 1989).

Earlier, I stated that, when the infant assimilates an experience (reintegration), he adds something to it. An example is amodal perception and cross-modal fluency. Because the newborn can fluently translate amodal experiences from one sense into another, Stern concludes that the ‘seen’ breast is experienced by the infant to be the same as the ‘sucked’ breast (Stern, 1985). In Fordham’s model, the global, whole nature of the infant’s perceptions is an expression of actions of the self that make them so. According to the infant’s experience, self objects are whole objects. However, even in infancy, self objects come and go, and so do experiences of wholeness and fusion (Fordham, 1985b).

SECOND COROLLARY: PART OBJECTS ARE A RESULT OF DEINTEGRATION AND REINTEGRATION

Self objects arise out of and represent the satisfied needs of the foetus and, later, the infant, and quickly develop into good objects. Early on, other concurrent sense data, for example, commotion from an older sibling, do not become integrated (Stern, 1985; Brazelton, 1991), or are experienced as not-self: if not-self objects are felt to be frustrating or unpleasant, they initially are rejected, attacked or evacuated (Fordham, 1976), and can later become bad objects. The intensification of and differentiation between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, which can be observed in young infants, is a result of early actions of the self, creating parts out of the whole.

At about six weeks to two months, dramatic changes occur in the infant, indicating a new surge of deintegration. Trevarthen details the considerable changes that occur in the area of communication. He describes in fascinating detail the intricate, alternating behaviours of infant and mother that develop into protoconversations. Later, at three to five months and given a secure relationship with a present mother, the infant turns away from face-to-face conversations in order to engage with an object animated by the mother (Trevarthen, 1980; Trevarthen and Marwick, 1986). Psychoanalytic baby observations show how babies this age explore objects on their own through mouthing and handling. Taken all together, these observations show how animate and inanimate become firmly differentiated.

Stern describes the gradual differentiation between self and other. He details how the infant sifts invariant from variant features of experience and organizes them into clusters of experiences associated with self and experiences associated with another, resulting in the infant’s sense of core self and sense of core other: ‘Somehow, the different invariants of self-experience are integrated…. Similarly, [the different invariants of different experiences of the mother] all get disentangled and sorted. “Islands of consistency” somehow form and coalesce’ (Stern, 1985:98).

In Fordham’s model, the sorting of invariant from variant features and the organization of them into discrete clusters are actions of the integrating and organizing functions of the primary self. Fordham would consider Stern’s description of the coalescence of ‘islands of consistency’ into a sense of self to be a description of ego formation. For Fordham, having a sense, a perception or an awareness—no matter how primitive—is a function of the ego (Fordham, 1994).

The self not only shapes the ego, it also adds something to the clustering of perceptions. This means that there is a fundamental difference between Fordham’s and Stern’s concepts of the ego. This can be seen in their different views about selfrepresentations, which arise in the ego. Stern’s representations of interactions that have been generalised (RIGS) are mental prototypes of lived experience, that is, memories of actual experiences. For Fordham, the ego is born out of the self and despite the gradual boundary that is built up between them, the self remains partially represented in the ego. Hence self representations contain aspects of the self, and are more than memories of actual experiences (Fordham, 1985b).

In summary, through deintegration and reintegration, the original wholeness of self objects divides up into parts, such as good and bad, inside and outside, animate and inanimate, and self and other.

THIRD COROLLARY: INDIVIDUATION BEGINS WITH THE DEPRESSIVE POSITION

At about ten to twelve months there is another surge of new developments, or deintegrations. In the period Trevarthen terms ‘secondary intersubjectivity’, play between mother and infant becomes a shared activity. The baby begins to cooperate with the mother, anticipating her intentions and learning from her the purposes of certain objects, for instance, what to do with a comb. When the meaning of an object can be shared, the object becomes a potential symbol (Trevarthen, 1980; Trevarthen and Marwick, 1986). According to Stern, this is the period of establishing a sense of subjective self. As the infant discovers that inner experiences are shareable, he begins to relate to his mother’s mind and acquires ‘a “theory” of separate minds’ (Stern, 1985:124). Thus, Trevarthen and Stern demonstrate the enormous potential for cognitive development that comes out of the bringing together of self/other, animate/inanimate, and inside (the mind)/outside (behaviour).

Psychoanalytic baby observations during this period are usually concerned with the infant’s final weaning from the breast. An example is from the observation of Edward, at twelve months, one week. I am grateful to the observer in the BAP training who allowed me to use the following extracts from her notes.

Edward was completely weaned from the breast only a few weeks before. At the beginning of the observation, the observer watched him being given lunch from a bowl. When the bowl was emptied and taken away, Edward suddenly let out an intense wail, ‘mouth open wide and crying bitterly so that he was just exhaling in bursts. He was inconsolable’.

His mother offered him the bowl and then juice, which he refused. Then she tried to hold him. Each effort on her part to comfort or distract seemed to escalate his screams. Eventually the mother took him into the lounge and cleared a space for him on the floor, while she sat close by. ‘For fifteen or twenty minutes, he rolled on the floor and screamed, [writhing] back and forth.’ Throughout this time the mother remained close and attentive.

Slowly the intensity of the screaming eased but did not stop, and Edward seemed able to tolerate his mother’s soothing. The screams had changed into something more regular and rhythmic, but [eventually] they stopped altogether and at last he lay still and quiet…. He stared at the ceiling, exhausted…. His mother bent over him after a while and he smiled slowly in response. Within minutes he was smiling and seemed quite happy.

The seminar group found this observation quite upsetting, and considered that Edward’s loss of the bowl might be an expression of his loss of the breast. Nothing external in the observation accounted for the unreachable depth and intensity of his response; he was responding to something internal. In thwarting his mother’s efforts to console or distract, he seemed to be ‘true’ to his experience of his loss and to show a depth of character. Eventually and of its own accord, the intensity subsided, disappeared, and a good relationship with the mother was resto...