Introducing Psychoanalysis

Essential Themes and Topics

Susan Budd, Richard Rusbridger, Susan Budd, Richard Rusbridger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135445706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychoanalysis
• Index: Psychology

Introducing Psychoanalysis brings together leading analysts to explain what psychoanalysis is and how it has developed, setting its ideas in their appropriate social and intellectual context.

Based on lectures given at the British Psychoanalytic Society, the contributions capture the diversity of opinion among analysts to provide a clear and dynamic presentation of concepts such as:

• sexual perversions
• trauma and the possibility of recovery
• phantasy and reality
• interpreting and transference
• two views of the Oedipus complex
• projective identification
• the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions
• symbolism and dreams.

Frequently misunderstood subjects are demystified and the contributors' wealth of clinical and supervisory experience ensures that central concepts are explained with refreshing clarity. Clinical examples are included throughout and provide a valuable insight into the application of psychoanalytic ideas. This overview of the wide variety of psychoanalytic ideas that are current in Britain today will appeal to all those training and practicing in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy, as well as those wishing to broaden their knowledge of this field.

Part 1
Basic concepts and psychic pain

Freud’s model of the mind is a dynamic one – that is, it envisages the mind as being in a constant state of flux and conflict between impulses arising in one part of the mind and defences against these impulses. His first model of the mind had been based on repression. What we cannot stand to think or remember, we learn to repress from consciousness. The unconscious – usually metaphorically conceived of as a deeper layer of the mind – exerts constant pressure to bring this material back to light. It comes up again in dreams, jokes, forgettings, ‘Freudian slips’, associations of ideas. Ideas are smuggled across the repression barrier in various forms, and in various ways we continue to forget and deny. This simple model, of repression, and the return of the repressed, is still a perfectly adequate way of describing many mental manoeuvres. Much psychic pain can be relieved by enabling people to remember what happened in a context where they feel safe. One of its virtues is to remind us that if we have to repress a lot, we lose a great deal of mental energy in the process. Psychoanalysis should enable us to accept ourselves more and thus release some of the instinctual energy which makes experience more vivid and life more enjoyable.

Quite soon, Freud came to realize that it was not just a question of getting people to remember. So many of his female patients ‘remembered’ sexual advances from their fathers that he came to believe that in at least some cases the memory was an unconscious fantasy, prompted by the universal and intolerable wish that we could have a sexual relationship with both our parents. It was this development of the theory which was to make Freud, and psychoanalysis, notorious. The idea that babies and children had sexual desires, even if they were expressed via oral and anal images and ideas, was unbearable. Persistent attempts were made to get him to redefine the sexual basis of our interest in each other as love; and some argue that attachment theories come close to doing the same thing. Freud was adamant. He wanted to keep the link between psychoanalysis and the body, and the promptings of the body, although he also wanted to maintain that unconscious fantasy about the body was distinct from physiological reality. Conversely, he has frequently been accused of avoiding the fact that some adults really do act on their sexual impulses towards children; that this is not the patient’s childish fantasy but memory. It is clear that he always knew that sexual abuse of children by adults was possible, but here too there is continuing indignation at the idea that children might have spontaneous sexual and aggressive fantasies as well as being subject to those of adults. The object-relations tradition has laid more emphasis on their aggressive fantasies.

Freud then began to visualize the mind less as composed of layers – as in his favourite archaeological metaphor – than as being made up of agencies or structures; the ego, the super-ego and the id. The id is the reservoir of instinctual impulses; the superego the fiercely irrational, unreasonable half-instinctual force which suppresses them; and the ego the rational part of the mind which is in touch with the external world, and which tries to mediate between our desires and reality so that we can stop insisting on what is impossible, and settle for what is. From the beginning, these terms were problematic. The German terms are simply the ‘I’, the ‘above-I’, and the ‘it’. Freud’s translators, Alix and James Strachey, wanted to keep these ordinary words; so did John Rickman; but Ernest Jones wanted a more abstract and formal terminology (Meisel and Kendrick 1985). In consequence, the terms have too often been reified; they have come to be seen not as metaphors for mental processes but as real entities.

Perhaps because the terms seemed so barren and far from experience, the next step was to reconceive of these processes less in terms of the structural model than of object relations. (The most systematic attempt by a British analyst to rewrite Freud’s metapsychology is probably still that by Ronald Fairbairn 1952.) The unconscious mind contains the history of how each one of us has been influenced by and conceives of the people who are important to us; how we have taken our versions of them into ourselves, where they support us, attack us, quarrel with other bits of us, and so on. Patients can often express this quite concretely: as in the man who described a little man sitting on his shoulder, talking in his father’s voice, telling him what to do and not to do; or the woman who felt that her mother took up the whole of her insides, so that she was just a thin skin on the outside. English psychoanalysis became less concerned with models of the mind than with the ghosts within the mind.

In Chapter 1, Catia Galatariotou gives a lucid description of the idea of mental defences, showing how Freud conceived of them as defending the equilibrium of the mind against disturbance from both internal and external factors. As Freud did, she gives a central place to repression, but goes on to describe the further work done by Freud’s daughter Anna, and by Klein on defences, in which they linked them up to inner objects. She makes it clear that, although she is describing the defences separately for the purposes of explication, in real life we use many simultaneously. It is easy in psychoanalytic writing to reify concepts, use concrete thinking, forget that our ideas are just models by which we hope to describe psychic internal reality, and have no actual existence.

The terms that Galatariotou describes and defines – amongst them regression, repression, disavowal, identification with the aggressor, projection, introjection, false self, etc. – constitute most of the basic vocabulary of psychoanalysis. Very often these terms are used without awareness that they belong to a theoretical framework, that of the analysis of the defences. The chapter shows how, from ideas which are conceptually quite simple, a subtle and powerful way of understanding mental processes can be built up. The basic approach, ‘defence analysis’, is often seen as more characteristic of North American ego psychology, but in fact it underpins the Kleinian and object-relations approaches as well. It describes the mechanisms which the mind uses to maintain its equilibrium and avoid psychic pain, rather than the specific unconscious phantasies which may result.

The next two chapters, by Betty Joseph and Priscilla Roth, show how the idea of a defence against psychic pain was developed by Melanie Klein into the concept of a position, something between a habitual set of defences which are the basis of unconscious phantasy (‘fantasy’ is spelt ‘phantasy’ to denote that it is unconscious, i.e. not a daydream) and a developmental stage. The idea of two positions, between which we all oscillate, moves us away from Freud’s more developmental linear theory, with its forward and regressive movements, to the idea of a perpetual alternation between two states of mind. Joseph has developed a technical approach (1989; Hargreaves and Varchevker 2004) which depends on the close observation of the movements of analyst’s and patient’s minds during the session, and here she describes the paranoid-schizoid position: normal and ubiquitous, indeed healthy, in babies.

Klein had developed the view, taken up by Freud in a late paper, that the ego not only suppresses what is unacceptable: it may split if it feels intolerably anxious (Klein 1946; Freud 1940). There are similarities between the young child’s defences, adult psychosis, and what happens to us all under conditions of great pain, anxiety or fear (a theme taken up by Caroline Garland’s in Chapter 16). At the psychotic extreme, this can result in deeply divided personalities, Jekylls and Hydes; in everyday experience, we all know people who seem to be triggered by certain situations to show a different side to their personalities. Jungians speak of ‘the shadow side’. Again, splitting is only a metaphor for a particular kind of mental manoeuvre which differs from repression in that the personality itself seems more divided, and gets rid of painful aspects of itself by attributing them, ‘projecting’ them, onto others.

In Chapter 2, Joseph focuses on a particular kind of splitting known as projective identification, and the way in which it can be used as a defence against various intolerable feelings. Sometimes analytic patients cope with painful feelings about their analysts by a fantasy of incorporating them; they unconsciously adopt their voices, opinions, ways of behaving, and so on. Joseph pays careful attention to how we get rid of painful thoughts and feelings, including those created in analysis, as our psychic defences begin to shift, and the way in which, having got rid of them by attributing them to someone else, we then experience ourselves as rather empty and hollow.

In Chapter 3, on the next stage of development, the ‘depressive position’, Priscilla Roth describes the stage of mental development that evolves from that of the paranoid-schizoid position. Klein described this as a particular set of anxieties, and defences against these anxieties, which begin when a child is about four months old as a result of neurological maturation of the brain. In her view, the baby becomes able to develop a complex, three-dimensional view of his object which supersedes the earlier feeling that it is either ideally good or wholly bad. The consequences of this development are profound: dread lest his hate for his object should have been too strong for his love for it, and guilt at having damaged it, which can lead to a realistic appraisal of the object, respect for its separateness and an urge to repair it. This represents the arrival of a moral universe and the basis of creativity. Roth shows how painful and precarious this development is, and how difficult it is for anyone to bear for very long. We all use defences – typically, manic defences that devalue the object, or regression to more primitive states of dividing our objects into perfect and wholly bad ones – against this pain. The two ‘positions’ oscillate in our minds throughout life. The normal paranoid-schizoid position is essential for maintaining healthy discrimination between good and bad, and for what could be life-saving responses of fight and flight in the face of danger. It gives clarity, intensity and vividness to experience.

Klein may have been the first psychoanalyst to discuss envy, but as Kate Barrows reminds us in Chapter 4, it is hardly something new in human life. Envy as a conscious emotion is painful, but it is part of our capacity for admiration to try to do better. It can represent both hatred and, in a less destructive form, ‘emulatory envy’, in which we can admire and learn from others. It is when it is destructive, and above all unconscious, that it is truly damaging. It is the most intractable obstacle to successful relationships, including those with analysts and therapists. Freud first described it as the negative therapeutic reaction, or the process by which a patient is compelled to undo and deny any good which he feels he has been done. He saw it more narrowly, in the context of penis envy, but in a late, great paper, ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’ (Freud 1937), he broadened the concept to something resembling the Lacanian concept of lack, and confessed to feeling defeated by the intractability of envy. Barrows argues that the concept is often used too restrictively; more broadly, envy represents a hatred and intolerance of difference.

Klein described one defence against the operations of envy as a kind of projective identification; a process whereby we get rid of our unwanted feelings by attributing them to other people, or being critical of them, in order to conceal our shameful envy. She showed vividly how the attack on goodness and creativity in the other leads to its destruction within the self, and to a terrible sense of hopelessness and worthlessness. She saw human beings as oscillating between a split up, fearful and suspicious state in which bad things happening are somebody else’s fault, and a state in which we can acknowledge that part of it is our fault, bear our guilt, and do what we can to make things better.

Another defence may take the form of attacking ourselves, trying to avoid showing our real or imagined superiority to others, in order not to attract their envy, since we unconsciously feel its malign power. Barrows discusses this as a peculiarly English trait; such envy is restrictive and damaging, but can also be the basis of ‘fair play’. The impact of envy on other people has always been felt as inexplicable, almost demonic. In the many societies which practise witchcraft, the impact of such projective identification is seen as being due to spirit possession.

There is a major difference in emphasis in clinical psychoanalysis in Britain at this point: do we lay more stress on innate guilt and destructiveness, or on the tragedy that has led someone to feel so depleted because of the painful and difficult circumstances of their upbringing, which have left them without much sense of inner or outer goodness? Stephen Mitchell (1993) points out that the division between those who think that aggression is innate in man and those who see it as reactive and defensive has been perennial throughout the history of psychoanalysis, but it is hardly surprising that we have been unable to resolve it: the problem has long been familiar to moral philosophers and psychologists. Just as in England the Kleinians and Independents tend to vary on this issue (see Riley, Chapter 14), in the United States classical Freudians disagree with Kohutians and self-psychologists.

References

Fairbairn, W.R.D. (1952) Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, London: Tavistock.

Freud, S. (1937) ‘Analysis terminable and interminable’, Standard Edition, vol. 23, pp. 209–54, London: Hogarth Press.

—— (1940) ‘The splitting of the ego for the purposes of defence’, Standard Edition, vol. 23, pp. 271–8, London: Hogarth Press.

Hargreaves, E. and Varchevker, A. (eds) (2004) In Pursuit of Psychic Change: The Betty Joseph Workshop, London: Brunner-Routledge.

Joseph, B. (1989) Psychic Equilibrium and Psychic Change: Selected Papers of Betty Joseph, M. Feldman and E. Bott Spillius eds, London: Routledge.

Klein, M. (1946) ‘Notes on some schizoid mechanisms’, International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 27: 99–110. Revised version in M. Klein, P. Heimann, S. Isaacs and J. Rivière, Developments in Psycho-Analysis, London: Hogarth Press, 1952, pp. 292–320. Reprinted in The Writings of Melanie Klein, vol. 3, pp. 1–24, London: Hogarth Press, 1975, Virago 1997.

Meisel, P. and Kendrick, W. (eds) (1985) Bloomsbury/Freud: The Letters of James and Alix Strachey, New York: Basic Books.

Mitchell, S. (1993) ‘Aggression and the endangered self’, Psychoanalytic Quarterly 62: 351–82.

Chapter 1

The defences

Catia Galatariotou

In its everyday meaning, the word ‘defence’ is familiar to us all. It conjures up an interaction between two parties: one attacking or threatening to attack, the other protecting themselves against aggression. Similarly in medicine, the dictionary tells us, ‘defence mechanism’ denotes ‘the body’s reaction against attack from disease organisms’. The psychoanalytic concept of defence is essentially the same. It differs in that its particular focus is the mind.

Freud was the first to discover and explore the vast territory of the defences. His findings remain essentially valid and crucially important after more than a century of psychoanalytic research, and are the basis of subsequent psychoanalytic thinking on the defences. I shall begin with an account of Freud’s ideas, then give an account of some of the most influential post-Freudian theoretical contributions, and close with a brief discussion of the technique of defence analysis.

Freud on defences

In discussing Sigmund Freud’s work I shall be referring to his structural model of the mind. In this, the mind is made up of three agencies, the id, the ego and the superego, with the external world amounting almost to a fourth agency. The id is an entirely unconscious part of the mind, from which all our basic instinctual impulses emanate. It is dominated by the ‘pleasure principle’ – the tendency to seek the pleasure that comes from the gratification of instinctual impulses. The id is a ‘seething cauldron’, Freud thought, which knows nothing about time, place, external reality, shame, disgust, morality. It has no conscience. All the id knows is that it wishes, and it wants its wishes gratified, now. The stronger the wish, the more it clamours for expression and satisfaction, building up pressure, pushing towards consciousness in order to obtain expression and satisfaction. For example, when the pressure of hunger becomes sufficiently strong, the infant cries and so demands to be fed; the warm milk that flows from the breast gratifies its instinctual demand and extinguishes the unpleasantness of hunger – for a while at least, until the cycle begins again. In the adult, the parallel can be a sexual wish, and its gratification.

However, almost from the moment of birth we begin to learn that the road between wish and gratification is not straightforward. The infant learns soon enough that a full breast will not materialize necessarily the moment it wants it. This is frustrating, and the experience of frustration sets in motion the long process of adaptation to the environment. And it is not long before the impact of shame, disgust and morality begins to be felt. The ‘dams’ of civilization, as Freud (1905: 178) called them, the dams, that is, of ‘disgust, shame and morality’, attempt to limit, control and canalize desire. We gradually learn that wishes and needs not only have to wait, and may not be gratified, but further that some of them are downright forbidden. Conflict between what we want and what we learn is unacceptable to want is built into the structure of psychological development almost from birth. The biggest lesson we learn is that gratification may come at a price, and sometimes the price is too high: to gratify some desires would be so unacceptable or costly to the rest of our self, that it would produce more unpleasure than pleasure. A decision has to be made, whether a particular wish is acceptable, or whether it is so unacceptable or unfeasible that it must be fought against and resisted.

This is the job of the ego. The ego has to decide whether to allow the gratification of an instinctual wish or whether, having judged it to be unacceptable or impossible, to try and block the troops of desire on their way from the id towards consciousness and gratification. It does this by mobilizing a counter-force – a defence – to pit against the forces of desire. Thus the troops of the defensive forces are stationed, as it were, in the ego; and they are ready to go into action as soon as unacceptable or unbearable ideas or affects threaten to invade and overwhelm the ego.

These defensive forces have reason to expect to be called to action very often indeed, for threats to the mind’s equilibrium do not only come from the id. They also come from the superego (the agency that prohibits and threatens punishment in the shape of a bad conscience for unacceptable thoughts and feelings) and from the external world, which presents the mind with stimuli that may also lead to tempting but forbidden ideas and feelings. Where there is conflict between the agencies of the mind, the ego has to perform the difficult task of keeping the peace – the peace of the mind, its equilibrium – as best it can. How does the ego know how to mobilize its defences? Freud came to think that anxiety was the signal that sets the defences in motion. (This is the ‘second theory of anxiety’, 1926, in which repression is a response to anxiety. Freud had previously thought that anxiety was due to repression.) Anxiety warns the ego that there is an approaching danger, namely the danger of a possible future trauma which would overwhelm it. As Freud’s biographer Peter Gay (1998: 488) put it: ‘Anxiety is the sentinel on the tower sounding the alarm [and] the defences are the troops mobilized to check the invader.’

The ego is the conscious part of our mind – but it is also, in its deeper layers, unconscious. This is important to remember because defences are unconscious processes. They are like troops working under cover of darkness. Consciously, we do not normally know of their existence and operations, but the tell-tale signs of their existence become more obvious in pathology.

To begin with, defences need to be formed to allow us to adapt to our environment, and as such they are universal to all human beings. They are indispensable, especially in the developing infant and child, in helping us to negotiate the difficult process of adaptation to reality, and to enable us to function appropriately as social beings. It is impossible to do so without defences. So they come into being as our allies. However, when they overgrow, when they are overused, when they cause us to deny reality as too painful, when, in short, they go wrong, then they turn into enemies: from servants of adaptation they turn into obstacles to adaptation, and inhibit rather than enhance our potential. Thi...