Reflections on Self Psychology (Psychology Revivals)

Joseph D. Lichtenberg, Samuel Kaplan, Joseph Lichtenberg, Samuel Kaplan, Joseph D. Lichtenberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780415718363
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317970934
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Originally published in 1983, Reflections on Self Psychology records the development of a powerful initiative to alter psychoanalytic theory and practice, and an evaluative questioning of this initiative. It presents a dialogue that developed at the Boston Symposium of 1980 between vigorous proponents of self psychology, equally energetic critics, and many participants between these polar positions.

This book attempts to capture within its pages not only the content of what was presented, explored, and evaluated in Boston, but also a sense of the people, about 1,000 strong, who exchanged their ideas on and off the podium – and the remarkable spirit of open inquiry that invigorated these proceedings.

The book, as was the meeting, is organized to explore four subjects: the development of the self: infant research; the implications of self psychology for psychoanalytic practice; self psychology and psychotherapy; and the implications of self psychology for psychoanalytic theory. The final section of the book is devoted to an essay by Heinz Kohut that provides an integrated response to the issues and criticisms raised in the course of the symposium. This essay while based on extemporaneous responses by Kohut during different phases of the meeting, is, in its written version, a cohesive, carefully revised, and edited statement prepared in the mellowing period following the meeting and before Kohut's untimely death.

V	SELF PSYCHOLOGY: IMPLICATIONS FOR PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY

23

Prologue

Melvin Bornstein, M.D.

New concepts in psychoanalysis may be stimulated by clinical observations, but a major test of their originality, value, and power takes place within the theoretical realm. Some new insights are easily assimilated into existing theory; others require alterations in the significance assigned to known factors. Some insights are regarded by their proponents as so unique in perspective and so divergent in approach that a new theory is required. Self psychology clearly started out to be an addition to existing psychoanalytic theory. Later, many of its proponents and adversaries stated that its precepts constituted a sizable alteration in existing theory but that a complementary accommodation could be made. More recent proposals have been regarded by some as constituting a new general theory or at least an alternative theory to both ego psychology and object relations theory.

This section contains four theoretical papers. The papers by Stolorow and Goldberg deal with specific theoretical issues that have been generated by self psychology. The contributions of Wallerstein and P. Ornstein constitute far-ranging attempts to place in focus the scope of the contribution of self psychology in relation to psychoanalytic theory in general. Each of the four papers takes up a number of specific isses, many new and many controversial. Along with an exploration of the specific issues, the reader may wish to consider the broad theoretical question: Can or should self psychology be integrated within existing theory, or is self psychology now or on its way to becoming a separate theoretical entity?

In the first paper in this section Stolorow takes his stand with those who would replace traditional metapsychology. He then compares the phenomena-near theory of self psychology with his own theory and those of Klein, Schäfer, and Atwood. Stolorow states that the issue of whether the self is a supraordinate concept is a problem of metapsychology and therefore it can be dismissed. Stolorow holds that the crucial problem becomes a set of empirical questions concerning the degree to which a firmly demarcated self-structure predominates in the organization of a person's subjective state. From this viewpoint self psychology is concerned with the development of the structuralization of self-experience. Stolorow believes his approach permits a complementarity between a psychology of conflict-ridden but firmly consolidated psychic structures and a psychology of missing or precarious psychological structures.

Employing an experience-near structural viewpoint, Stolorow examines the concept of transmuting internalization during a successful analysis. He describes two developmental processes that comprise transmuting internalization: (1) the patient's acquisition of functions involved in the maintenance of self-cohesion, self-continuity, and self-esteem; (2) the structuralization of self-experience whereby the analyst's empathic understanding facilitates the reactivation of stalled developmental processes and the reorganization of the subjective field, building up an increasingly differentiated self-structure.

In the second paper in this section Goldberg mounts a direct challenge to existing psychoanalytic theories. Unlike Stolorow, who aims for a working complementarity retaining structural concepts by modifications, Goldberg attacks a bastion concept of the structural hypothesis. According to Goldberg internalization, as it is treated in classical psychoanalytic theory, by its preoccupation with the dichotomy between inside and outside, places undue emphasis on discrete boundaries between people. He suggests that an analysis of the phenomena subsumed under internalization refers to the inner experience of ownership, privacy, and representability. Goldberg believes that an advantage of his alternative theoretical model for internalization is that it shifts the emphasis to sharing and to the bridging of separateness by a communicative link. In studying Goldberg's presentation the reader can reconsider the many clinical entities subsumed under internalization and determine how well these are accounted for by ownership, privacy, and representability. Does the reader agree that this self-psychological model offers greater flexibility and freedom in conceptualizing experiential relationships than a model based on complex transformations from “outside” to “inside?”

In a carefully thought out evaluative commentary Wallerstein describes two aspects of self psychology: a clinical theory that he values highly and a general theory about which he has serious questions. Wallerstein believes that in its delineation of narcissistic phenomena as discerned in the specific narcissistic mirroring and idealizing transferences and their counterpart, the specific counter-transferences, self psychology makes its most precise contribution to psychoanalysis. In contrast to his appreciation of the clinical theory, Wallerstein is critical of aspects of the general theory of self psychology. He describes many complex issues that reflect areas of serious controversy between the theories of self psychology and those of classical psychoanalysis. He gives particular emphasis to what he regards as a false dichotomy between a deficit and a conflict model. He accuses self psychology of equating conflict with pathology rather than acknowledging that conflict is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. To buttress his argument Wallerstein proposes a broadened definition in which conflict is regarded as tension between contradictory wishes of all sorts—a definition he believes self psychology could accept without weakening its position. In addition, Wallerstein is critical of what he considers to be self psychology's one-sided emphasis on empathy. Too much reliance on empathy in analysis can lead to knowledge that is incomplete or incorrect, and he adds, it places undue responsibility for therapeutic difficulty on the therapist's being unempathic. Moreover, a one-sided emphasis on empathy encourages an overevaluation of external events. Overall, Wallerstein objects to the trend of self psychology to redefine psychoanalysis narrowly in terms of an empathic introspective awareness within the selfobject context, a view he believes is a theoretical reductionistic oversimplification.

Wallerstein advises psychoanalysis to maintain one classical theory so that the phenomena of complex mental states that it studies can be embodied within its one (Freudian) paradigm and thus retain a perspective of overdetermination and of multiple (metapsyetiological) points of view. He repeatedly emphasizes that the optional metaphors for psychoanalysis lie within the unifying language and thought conventions of “both/and,” rather than the splitting and dichotomizing thrusts of “either/or.”

P. Ornstein's discussion ranges over the ground covered by Stolorow, Goldberg, and Wallerstein and provides a basic statement of the assertions of self psychology. The essence of Ornstein's argument is that self psychology constitutes a clinical and theoretical point of view so radically different that it is a separate competing basic hypothesis. Thus, Goldberg's effort to replace the concept of internalization employed by all other psychoanalytic theories with concepts of ownership, privacy, and representability is in line with the attempt of self psychology to use experience-near metaphors. But Ornstein rejects the attempts of Stolorow and Wallerstein to treat self psychology as complementary to, or able to be included within, a modified structural theory. Because the issue of conflict versus deficit is the main sticking point, Ornstein devotes his major effort to establishing the superiority of self psychology's concept of deficits to explain transference phenomena. The reader must follow Ornstein through a series of intricate arguments by which he attempts to demonstrate that the clinical data now understood as the result of primary conflict can be better accounted for by an understanding of structural deficits that develop from traumatic disruption of the empathic bond between self and selfobject.

24	Self Psychology—A Structural Psychology

Robert D. Stolorow, Ph.D.

Just as the self has been characterized as bipolar in its structure and development (Kohut, 1977), self psychology too has been bipolar in its evolution. Its first nodal point, The Analysis of the Self (Kohut, 1971), was a monumental clinical contribution, extending psychoanalytic understanding and treatment to those disturbances in self-experience that we call “narcissistic.” Explicated in this book were such essential clinical discoveries and theoretical ideas as the “narcissistic transferences,” the concept of a “selfobject,” the concept of “transmuting internalization,” and the proposition that narcissism and object love have conceptually separate lines of development. In the first phase in the evolution of self psychology, these contributions were, quite understandably, still grafted to the Procrustean bed of Freudian metapsychology and were voiced in the language of traditional “mental apparatus” psychology and “drive-discharge” theory. In contrast, in self psychology's second nodal point, The Restoration of the Self (Kohut, 1977), these seminal clinical discoveries and conceptualizations were freed from the strictures of classical metapsychology and boldly reformulated within a new theoretical framework placing the experience of self at the center of psychoanalytic inquiry. This framework, I believe, constitutes no less than a new scientific paradigm for psychoanalysis. I would characterize it as a developmental phenomenology of the self, because it is principally concerned with the ontogenesis and structuralization of self-experience, its conscious and unconscious constituents, and their normal and pathological developmental vicissitudes. This new paradigm, involving a conceptual shift from the motivational primacy of instinctual drives to the motivational primacy of self-experience, enables us to comprehend a wide variety of pathological states and psychological products from the standpoint of a person struggling to maintain a sense of self-cohesion in the face of threats of self-disintegration, rather than from the standpoint of a mental apparatus processing drive energies and dealing with instinctual conflicts. Infantile “drive” experiences are no longer to be regarded as primary instinctual givens, but as “disintegration products” that occur when a precarious self-structure has not been properly supported. “Fixations” at various pleasure aims associated with the erotogenic zones, for example, are seen as stemming from efforts to counteract feelings of inner deadness, self-fragmentation, and self-loss. Similarly, destructive rage is viewed not as the manifestation of an elemental instinctual viciousness, but as a secondary reaction to the traumatic empathy failures of caregivers that have menaced the cohesion of a vulnerable self-structure.

In this paper I attempt to clarify further the distinctive features of self psychology as a scientific paradigm by exploring its relationship to some other innovative ideas that have recently fermented within the field of Freudian psychoanalysis. In this way I hope to highlight Heinz Kohuts unique contribution to psychoanalytic thought.

Among recent critiques of Freudian theory, some of the most constructive have been those that rest upon George Klein's (1976) clarifying distinction between the metapsychology and the clinical theory of psychoanalysis. Metapsychology and clinical theory, Klein held, derive from two completely different universes of discourse. Metapsychology deals with the material substrate of subjective experience and is thus couched in the natural science framework of impersonal mechanisms, discharge apparatuses, and drive energies, which are presumed to “exist” as entities or events in the realm of objective reality. In contrast, clinical theory, which derives from the psychoanalytic situation and guides psychoanalytic practice, deals with intentionality and the personal meaning of subjective experiences seen from the perspective of the individual's unique life history. Clinical theory asks “why” questions and seeks answers in terms of personal reasons, purposes, and individual meanings. Metapsychology asks “how” questions and seeks answers in terms of impersonal mechanisms and causes. Klein wished to disentangle metapsychological and clinical concepts and to retain only the latter as the legitimate content of psychoanalytic theory. For him, clinical psychoanalytic constructs constituted a self-sufficient psychological theory uniquely suited for guiding the investigation of the data of the psychoanalytic situation.

It is my contention that self psychology, in its mature form as a new scientific paradigm, is essentially a clinical psychoanalytic theory in Klein's sense. This, I believe, is one of its principal virtues. The central theoretical constructs of self psychology were derived directly from the psychoanalytic situation—specifically, from sustained, empathic-introspective immersions into patients' subjective worlds as reflected in the microcosm of the transference (Ornstein, 1978). Correspondingly, self psychology's central constructs pertain to the realm of the experience-near and therefore embody a person-alistic, rather than a mechanistic, perspective. These two features of clinical theory—experience-nearness and derivation from the clinical situation—are nowhere better exemplified than in the concept of a selfobject, the foundational construct upon which the theoretical framework of self psychology rests. This concept of an object experienced as incompletely distinguished from the self and serving to maintain the sense of self finally lifts the shadow that fell upon Freud's (1914/1957) theory of object choice when he tried to formulate the personal, narcissistic meaning of attachments in terms of the impersonal workings of an energy-discharge apparatus. More importantly, the concept of a selfobject radically alters our understanding of the meaning of patients' experiences in the analytic situation. As Evelyne Schwaber (1979) has aptly observed, our listening perspective is refined and broadened to encompass the “perceptual validity” of a patient's use of the analytic bond as an essential aspect of his own self-experience. Our interpretive focus is shifted from what patients might wish to ward off to what they need to restore and maintain (Stolorow & Lachmann, 1980)—to the idealizing and mirroring ties, thwarted during the formative years, which they now come to rely on for their sense of self-cohesion, self-continuity, and self-esteem.

To sum up so far, self psychology can be shown to meet the essential criteria for a clinical psychoanalytic theory. Its fundamental constructs are derivative of and uniquely appropriate to the meanings that can be apprehended in the psychoanalytic situation through empathy and introspection. In this respect self psychology promises to make psychoanalytic theory more scientific—that is, more closely grounded in psychoanalytic data. Such rootedness in psychoanalytic data contrasts sharply with those classical meta-psychological constructs that are remnants of 19th-century physiology and are essentially unrelated to the psychoanalytic situation.

One of the most comprehensive efforts at constructing a clinical theory for psychoanalysis has been offered by Roy Schafer (1976). In his valuable critique of metapsychology he demonstrates that its structural-energic concepts represent unlabeled spatial metaphors, concretistic reifications that treat nonsubstantial subjective experiences and fantasies as though they were thinglike entities. He proposes to dispense entirely with these reified constructs and to replace them with a theoretical framework called “action language.” This language brings to focus the person-as-agent—that is, the person as a performer of actions who consciously and unconsciously authors his own life. Within this language the subject matter of psychoanalytic conceptualization becomes action itself, especially disclaimed actions, as well as the individual's conscious and unconscious personal reasons for his actions.

Although there are certain broad similarities between action language and self psychology (they are both personalistic and holistic theories rather than mechanistic and atomistic ones), a careful scrutiny of the two frameworks reveals that they address fundamentally different empirical domains. Action language presupposes that the sense of self-as-agent—the experience of the self as a demarcated and abiding center of initiative—has been firmly consolidated. In contrast, self psychology is concerned with understanding just those subjective states in which the sense of self-as-agent has remained undeveloped or atrophied as a result of developmental interferences and arrests. Psychological configurations that are remnants of developmental voids or traumatically aborted developmental thrusts cannot be fruitfully conceptualized as purposefully performed actions. Thus, action language may be well suited for conceptualizing instances of intrapsychic conflict in which the attainment of a cohesive self-structure can be presupposed, but it cannot cover the clinical domain that has been the central concern of self psychology—the domain of missing, vulnerable, fragmentation-prone psychic structure.

In an earlier paper (Stolorow, 1978) drawing on work in collaboration with George Atwood (Stolorow & Atwood, 1979), I proposed that psychoanalysis as a clinical theory is best viewed as a structural psychology concerned with the nature, developmental vicissitudes, multiple functions, and therapeutic transformation of the psychological structures that organize a person's subjective experiences in general and shape the p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgments
• I. Introductory Section
• II. The Development of the Self: Infant Research
• III. Self Psychology: Implications for Psychoanalytic Practice
• IV. Self Psychology and Psychotherapy: Theoretical and Clinical Considerations
• V. Self Psychology: Implications for Psychoanalytic Theory
• VI. Theory
• Name Index
• Subject Index