The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration

Rochelle G. K. Kainer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134902934
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Developmental Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration is a rich and clinically detailed account of the therapeutic restoration of the self, and speaks to the healing process for analysts themselves that follows from Rochelle Kainer's sensitive integration of heretofore dissociated realms of psychoanalytic theory. In describing how the reworking of pathological internal object relationships occurs in conjunction with the transformation of selfobject failures, Kainer brings new insight to bear on the healing of the self at the same time as she contributes to healing the historic split in psychoanalysis between Kleinian theory and self psychology.

Extensive case illustrations, refracted through the lens of her uniquely integrative perspective, bring refreshing clarity to elusive theoretical concepts. Of special note is Kainer's distinction between normal and pathological identifications. Equally valuable is her introduction of the term "imaginative empathy" to characterize the kind of attunement that is integral to analytic healing; her nuanced description of the relation between imaginative empathy and projective identification bridges the worlds of Kleinian theory and self psychology in an original and compelling way. She ends by spelling out how her theoretical viewpoint leads to a more comprehensive understanding of various clinical phenomena.

The Collapse of the Self and Its Therapeutic Restoration, is a sophisticated yet accessible work, gracefully written, that elaborates a relational theory of thinking, of creativity, of identification, and of the formation and healing of psychic structure. Kainer's ability to bring the often dissonant voices of different psychoanalytic schools into theoretical harmony as she develops her viewpoint conveys both the breadth of intellectual engagement with colleagues and the depth of clinical engagement with patients that inform her project from beginning to end.

Part I

Creating the Self

The theme of identification, and its great significance in the formation of the ideal and pathological aspects of the self, are developed in the chapters of this first section. One’s active pursuit of the ideal self rests on conscious and unconscious identifications in the service of becoming. Similarly, the formation of the pathological self rests on the powerful regressive pull of our objects of attachment. These chapters explore how the bad object and the ideal object exert their force, highlighting the dialectical tension between the power of the need for attachment and the will toward self-creation within the individual.

Chapter One

Found Objects

On the Nature of Identification

Found objects are invitations to flights of fancy. They challenge us to invent, to expand the borders of what are considered the proper components for an interior. … Each found object is the unique expression of its interpreter. It is as individual as you or I.

—MARIO BUATTA, Found Objects

The paradox of the self that we create lies in the duality of its chance and determined nature. The taking in of our objects creates a dialectical tension that is always at work within the self. Identifications—unconscious as well as conscious—form a large part of the self in both its pathological and its ideal aspects. The triumph of the ideal over the pathological forms the basis of the transcendent self and brings us to the therapeutic task.

This chapter sets out a general theory of the role of identifications in making that which is outside of the self part of the self-structure. Freud held that a libidinal attachment is never abandoned; lost objects are taken back through an identification with them. Klein’s focus was on the destructive; identifications are forged through the instinctual envy of the good object. Fairbairn, shifting from the instinctual to the object relational, said that we internalize the object experienced as both exciting and rejecting. If early libidinal attachments are indeed immutable, my thesis is that identification with the bad object is the echo of an intense object-relationship, born of disappointed love which has turned to hate. The “shadow of the object” (Freud, 1917, p. 249) lingers on adhesively in the psyche and forms the core of the pathological self. Pathological identifications are characterized by a loss of freedom and choice.

In contrast, in identifications forming the nonpathological self, the will-to-form the ideal self (Rank, 1932) stimulates partial identifications with the admired object (Jacobson, 1964), identification with likeness (Kohut, 1984), and identification with the ideal object (Kainer, 1996). They comprise our object of identification¹ for individuation, growth, and the fullest experience of self. Like their counterpart in art, our objects of identification are “found objects,” used for the purpose of creating the self. We relate to them as to a Duchamp² “Readymade” (see chapter two): taking them in, imbuing them with subjective meaning, and appropriating them as our own. Never entirely finished with its artwork, the self contains both its failed parts adhesively clinging to the bad object and those parts which are more freely chosen and thus more successfully realized.

The identifications made with our pathological objects, and those made with our ideal objects, are of special interest because of their dynamic interplay in the creation of the self. In our pursuit of the ideal self,³ there is a struggle with internalized pathological objects—still powerful because they serve defensive or relational needs (or both) and have become adhesive (Meltzer, 1975) because of that. They were once our objects of survival. Attachment to these bad objects generates a continuous, lifelong internal dialectic between the forward push of the ideal and the regressive pull of the pathological.⁴ The longing to realize the ideal self fuels the search for therapeutic transformation; transcending the regressive pull of the pathological self constitutes the therapeutic task.

The unconscious aspects of pathological identification arise from a great need to deny and suppress the dangerous emotions stimulated by the bad object. In addition, however bad they may be, they can also elicit unconscious pity because of an identification with their pain. We often retain, through identification, their worst features. These identifications with our objects become the bedrock of our emotional life.⁵ By the nature of their power, adhesive identifications become the subject of analysis—and the object of the longing for transformation, and of becoming (see chapter two).

THE PRECURSOR OBJECTS OF IDENTIFICATION

The effects of the first identifications made in earliest childhood will be general and lasting.

—S. FREUD, “The Ego and the Id”

Freud: Lasting Love

The important place I give to identification in the life narrative⁶ has its roots in some of the ideas of Freud, Klein, Fairbairn, Jacobson, Schafer, Racker, and Kohut. I will briefly trace those of their thoughts which directly bear on the ideas here. The relevant thread in Freud’s thought is embedded in the critic Harold Bloom’s comment, in a lecture he presented, that psychoanalysis is a theory of love. Freud (1917) made clear the power of attachment to our object of love—that we “never willingly abandon a libidinal position” (p. 244). Should the object be lost, a narcissistic (i.e., ego) identification with the object can “substitute for the erotic cathexis” (p. 249).

This “law” of love is closely related to Freud’s use of the metaphor of the energic laws of physics. Total energy (in this case libido) cannot be lost—it can only be transformed.⁷ If the libidinal cathexis to the object itself is weakened, its free energy is transformed into an identification with it. The result of a “narcissistic identification with the object” is that “in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up” (p. 249). Thus, in Freud’s theory of instincts, the energy associated with loving the object remains even if the object is lost. Although psychoanalytic theory has evolved beyond an energic instinctual model, there is no doubt that we stay attached to our early objects, both in actuality and through an identification with them affecting our internal world.⁸

Love and Narcissistic Identification

Freud’s theory of libido is itself an example of the relationship of love to a narcissistic (self) identification. He himself never abandoned it. It was his uniquely creative discovery and most lasting love—despite all other significant changes in the development of his thinking. His historic breaks with Jung, Adler, and Rank were rooted in their challenge to this (his) heart of psychoanalysis. Freud was always identified with, and can be identified by, the narrative of his creation. Freud exists as “Freudian” theory.

In this famous passage—which presaged the development of the superego—Freud (1917) outlined his narrative concerning the persistence of attachments born of love:

An object-choice, an attachment of the libido to a particular person, had at one time existed; then, owing to a real slight or disappointment coming from this loved person, the object-relationship was shattered. The result was not the normal one of withdrawal of the libido from this object and a displacement of it on to a new one, but something different … the free libido was not displaced on to another object; it was withdrawn into the ego … [and] served to establish an identification of the ego with the abandoned object. Thus, the shadow of the object fell upon the ego and the latter could henceforth be judged by a special agency, as though it were an object, the forsaken object [p. 249].

Freud (1923) later added, “The character of the ego is the precipitate of abandoned object-cathexes and … it contains the history of those object-choices” (p. 29, italics added).

Internalized as the ego ideal, each small turn of the self is critically and inexorably measured against it. Not only does the self contain the residues of all that we have lost and internalized, we now stand vulnerable to harsh self-criticism in the shadow of all the objects with whom we have identified. Freud’s idea is overwhelming to contemplate, yet, in the light of the powerful struggle between self and the internalized other seen clinically, it rings true.

Jacobson: Partial Identifications on the Way to Becoming

Identifications cannot be created out of nothing. They involve selective reorganization of already existing wishes, behavior, patterns, capacities, viewpoints, and emphases. … It is the reorganization itself … that is the novelty in identification.

—ROY SCHAFER (1968, p. 147)

Continuing the theme of the power of love and attachment in relation to the development of identifications, Edith Jacobson (1964) had an understanding of its more conscious—and less adhesive—aspects, those bearing on the formation of the ideal self (see chapter two). Although Jacobson remained focused on the framework of drive theory, she made an important contribution regarding the development of the self in relation to its objects. Speaking of a young child’s advance in the object world from symbiotic attachment to ego autonomy, she was describing a later stage of development beyond that of Mahler’s (1968, pp. 7–31) infant’s developmental progression from normal autism to normal symbiosis to separation-individuation. Stern’s (1985) infant research corrected the Mahlerian perception, and that aspect of Jacobson’s theory does not fully represent the fine-tuning of this later work (pp. 18–19).

Nonetheless, Jacobson’s narrative is very useful and evocative. She sensed how we emerge from our embeddedness in our earliest objects and begin to create a self that not only reflects these objects, but also that is separate and distinct from them. The young child, in creating its identity, has both a sense of the future and a wish for a “realistic likeness” to the love object. These are achieved through a “selective identification”:

In fact, the ego cannot acquire a realistic likeness to the love object unless admired traits of this object become enduringly introjected into the child’s wishful self images. … [They] reflect the traits actually taken over from the object of identification, so that a likeness between object and self images can now be experienced on a realistic basis. … [These selective identifications] are a prerequisite for the establishment of ego ideal and ego goals, i.e., of realistic goals regarding the future [p. 51].

Thus, Jacobson advanced drive theory to include a concept of self forged by selective identifications with loved and admired objects of attachment. These admiration-based identifications preserve the available love and strength of the object.⁹ These selective (partial) identifications represent a developmental compromise between either remaining symbiotically attached (in the object’s thrall) or, alternatively, destructively breaking the symbiotic ties “by way of aggressive, narcissistic expansion and independent ego functioning” (p. 50). Her work suggests that partial identifications can lend a nonpathological fluidity to the sense of self. Identifications with what is admired, while strong, are not “adhesive,” as are fear-driven identifications. The fluidity reflects the greater ease between holding on to, and letting go of, the other.

Jacobson’s self goes beyond Freud’s (1923, p. 15) ego as the mediator of id impulses with reality. We now have a self that can be seen as self-determined rather than merely being driven. It is a self that functions as an organizer of one’s individuality and growth and has the potential for balancing the paralyzing identifications made with the “bad object.”

Theories as Found Objects: The Examples of Jacobson and Klein

In addition to their developmental role in the formation of identity, partial identifications (selection of what is admired) play an important role in thinking and creativity, as in the example of my identification with some (but not all) of the existing ideas in psychoanalysis. For example, I may make a partial identification with Freud’s (1915) idea that we never give up an object of love and use it as a building block for the development of my own theoretical position, without symbiotically merging with his entire body of thought or becoming a “Freudian.”

Jacobson and Klein were Freudian by virtue of their time and place in history but nonetheless were not so merged that they could not make important advances and, in the case of Klein, radical ones. Klein (1946, 1952) revolutionized Freud’s concept of the superego with her belief that it exists from birth and is crucial to the powerful projective and introjective processes taking place between mother and infant. Klein, however, in contrast to almost all of Freud’s other followers, never abandoned the death instinct. She continued to identify with it and be identified by it.

But Jacobson never gave up the superego as Freud conceived of it—as “heir to the Oedipus complex,” that is, as a function of the renunciation of instinctual impulses. Jacobson’s ideas on the object-relational aspects of the development of the self are, however, a distinct push toward present-day thinking. Klein’s and Jacobson’s advances reflect a mixture of attachment and individuation in relation to their most important precursor figure and object of identification. The strength of the work of these writers lies in their grappling with the pull of the theory in which they were steeped and the push of the vision of their own originality (see chapter two). Their identification with Freudian thought was not absolute and reflected their individuality. Their attachment to Freud was maintained, but redefined by them—allowing for greater intellectual freedom.

Selective Identifications and the Transformation of Self

There is a parallel need for fluidity and freedom in the analytic situation, but the conditions for achieving it differ from those in the situation with the precursor. The selective identifications made by the patient in search of the transformational analyst are also admiration based, but the need here is not solely to take on the traits of the admired object, but to have the analyst capable of identifying with them. Klein and Jacobson did not actually need Freud to identify with them to achieve their creative freedom in the intellectual realm (although they might have had fantasies about that), but the patient needs the analyst to do so in the emotional realm. In the hope of being more fully known, there is a radical need for the therapist’s “I” to be the same as the “I” of the patient.

In the therapeutic situation, in order for the analyst to be able to identify with the patient, there must be a capacity to make a “concordant identification” (Racker, 1957). That is, the analyst must be able to identify with the “self-component of the patient’s internal object relationship” (Ogden, 1986, p. 152). As Racker (1957) notes, “The concordant identification is based on introjection and projection, or, in...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Frontmatter
• Foreword
• Preface
• Part 1 Creating the Self
• Part II The Collapse of the Self
• Part III The Therapeutic Restoration of the Self
• References
• Index