Psychoanalysis in Social Research

Shifting theories and reframing concepts

Claudia Lapping

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780415656863
• eBook ISBN: 9781134020058
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

The use of psychoanalytic ideas to explore social and political questions is not new. Freud began this work himself and social research has consistently drawn on his ideas. This makes perfect sense. Social and political theory must find ways to conceptualise the relation between human subjects and our social environment; and the distinctive and intense observation of individual psychical structuring afforded within clinical psychoanalysis has given rise to rich theoretical and methodological resources for doing just this. However, psychoanalytic concepts do not remain the same when they are rearticulated in the context of research.

This book traces the reiteration and transformation of concepts in the psychoanalytic theory of Freud, Klein and Lacan, the social theory of Butler, Derrida, Foucault, Laclau and Zizek, and case studies of empirical research ranging from the classic Tavistock Institute studies to contemporary work in politics, gender studies, cultural studies and education. Each chapter explores one cluster of concepts:

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• Melancholia, loss and subjectivity

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• Overdetermination and free association

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• Resistance, reflexivity and the compulsion to repeat

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• Repression, disavowal and foreclosure

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• Psychic defenses and social defenses

Arguing against the reification of psychoanalytic concepts, Claudia Lapping suggests the need for a reflexive understanding of the play of attachments and substitutions as concepts are reframed in the contrasting activities of psychoanalysis and research.

1 Melancholia

Lost objects of national, ethnic,
classed, gendered and sexual
identities

Introduction: political discourse as a form of mourning?

Writing about post-Communist political discourse twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and noting a strand that is turning from anti-communism to a sense of nostalgia for ‘the “good old days” of Communism’, Slavoj Zizek comments: ‘The nostalgia for communism shouldn’t be taken too seriously: far from expressing an actual wish to return to a grey Socialist reality, it is a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past’ (2009). What might it mean to interpret nostalgic political discourses in terms of psychical processes of mourning? Just how little or how much of a clinical psychoanalytic account of mourning might we be able to trace in this kind of analysis? In ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ Freud explains that mourning can take place in response to the loss of a loved person, but also in response to ‘the loss of some abstraction … such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (1957, p. 243). He suggests that in mourning: ‘Each single one of the memories and expectations in which the libido is bound to the object is brought up and hypercathected and detachment of the libido is accomplished in respect of it’ (p. 245).

The fall of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe can, then, be understood as a loss that requires a period of mourning during which the subject might be expected to revisit different aspects of the lost object. Eventually, when this work of revisiting and detaching from the lost object is achieved, Freud suggests, ‘the ego becomes free and uninhibited again’ (p. 245). Zizek’s interpretation implies that contemporary nostalgia for Communism should be understood as an instance of revisiting of memories of a lost object, and that this strand of political discourse will naturally be left behind when the process of mourning is completed. However, the intense and painful sorrow that is also associated with mourning is not directly apparent in Zizek’s example. For me, his interpretation is at once insightful and puzzling: insightful because it makes sense that the people who grew up under Communism need in some way to engage with the traces of the lost regime; and puzzling because I can’t quite work out what this interpretation leaves out, or what kinds of accounts might add depth to an interpretation of nostalgic political discourse as a form of mourning for a lost aspect of national identity. How is Zizek’s speculative interpretation different from the interpretation of mourning in the clinical context? How is it similar? What principles are being used to distinguish this as an instance of mourning rather than melancholia? Is there additional data that might perhaps help to elaborate Zizek’s interpretation?

Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia and Klein’s development of his ideas in her account of processes of mourning have provided an enormously productive structure for interpretation within both psychoanalysis and more sociologically orientated research. Adam Phillips explains:

Without mourning for primary objects there is no way out of the magic circle of the family. Indeed, partly through the work of Klein, mourning has provided the foundation for development in most versions of psychoanalysis; so much so, in fact, that mourning has acquired the status of a quasi-religious concept in psychoanalysis. Analysts believe in mourning; if a patient were to claim, as Emerson once did, that mourning was ‘shallow’ he or she would be considered to be ‘out of touch’ with something or other.

(1997, p. 153)

There are, as Phillips suggests, potential dangers when a conceptual structure gains a hegemonic grip on practice, taking on a ‘quasi-religious’ status that limits interpretive strategies. But the productivity of the concept also suggests the potential for enriched understandings of melancholia to be developed in the construction of analyses that reactivate naturalized theoretical categories. Freud initially developed his conception of melancholia through his observations of similarities between patients mourning a death and those with no evident object of their apparent mourning. What is so enticing about his articulation of this analogy as a way of understanding social as well as purely psychical relations? And in what ways might uses of the concept within social analysis constitute either productive reactivations or dogmatic sedimentations ¹ of its psychoanalytic origins? This chapter explores a series of four studies that deploy the concepts of mourning and melancholia to interpret national, ethnic, gendered and classed social identities and suggests the productivity of these accounts. However, the broader aim of my presentation of these contrasting studies is to explore the idea that melancholia is a conceptual structure that permits diverse instantiations through a play of substitutions, none of which constitutes an essential, immutable core. Even the notion of ‘loss’ cannot be constituted as a fixed centre, since the meaning of loss itself shifts across the various instantiations explored in the chapter. The concept of melancholia is thus not an entity that exists outside a particular instance of analysis: rather, melancholia is a cluster of ideas and conceptual structures that can be taken up, shifted and transformed in the process of articulating an interpretation.

The studies explored in this chapter have been selected to illustrate the range of conceptual and methodological threads taken up in the re-articulation of notions of melancholia. Some of the examples combine clinical and speculative analysis, while others bring psychoanalytic conceptions of melancholia to bear in the interpretation of cultural or sociological data. I am interested both in the methodological processes suggested in these analyses and also in the ways in which they foreground or suppress different elements within psychoanalytic theorizations of mourning and melancholia. Psychoanalytic theorizations specify the symptoms associated with mourning and melancholia and construct speculative accounts of the psychical or subjective aspects of these processes. Freud’s initial account tends to foreground distinctions between the processes of mourning and melancholia, while Melanie Klein’s theory tends to foreground continuities between the two conditions. Both Freud and Klein theorize a relation between melancholic processes and the establishment of the ego, or the initiation of the subject. Judith Butler develops this account of the loss that instantiates the subject to conceptualize gender as a melancholic effect of entry into a symbolic order that forecloses non-heterosexual identities.

The first section of the chapter sets out some elements of these theorizations of psychical responses to loss. The following sections explore the way different elements of these theories are used in four analyses that focus on loss as constitutive of social, rather than individualized identities. The studies range from Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlichs’ (1975) account of post-war German identity, first published in 1967, to David Eng and Shinhee Han’s exploration of Asian American subjectivity, published in Loss, a collection of essays exploring experiences of loss within the socio-political contexts of the twentieth century (Eng and Kanzanjian, 2003); and from Adam Jukes, (1993a) analysis of violence and male sexuality written in the context of the women’s movement in the late eighties and early nineties to Jessica Ringrose’s study of girls’ friendships within the regulative, heterosexualized context of early twenty first-century popular culture (2008).

Throughout the chapter I am also trying to maintain a sense of the social relations instantiated within methodological practice: an understanding of methodology as embodied within specific historical and professional contexts (Bourdieu, 2004). The authors of the studies discussed in this chapter have varied political and professional affiliations, ranging, for example, from those with clinical training, such as the Mitscherlichs, Shinhee Han and Adam Jukes, to those positioned within university departments of the humanities and social sciences, such as Judith Butler, David Eng and Jessica Ringrose. Contrasting embodiments of theory are constituted through the recontextualization of discursive features or aspects of theory from one context to another: the new context will recognize and value aspects of the existing discourse or theory, and will ignore or reject others (Bernstein, 2000, Lacan, 2007). The foregounding or suppression of aspects of the concept of melancholia cannot, therefore, be abstracted from the particular context and embodiment of the theorist.

Theorizations of mourning and melancholia: Freud, Klein
and Butler

Freud’s conceptualization of melancholia is based on an analogy he constructs between patients mourning bereavement and patients exhibiting symptoms of melancholy. He notes the similarity in the ‘painful frame of mind’, ‘loss of interest in the outside world’ and the ‘loss of the capacity to love’ (1957, p. 244) that characterizes both ‘normal’ mourning and the melancholic condition that is considered pathological. However, where in mourning this ‘grave departure from the normal attitude to life’ (p. 243) is an understandable and temporary response to a visible loss, the prolonged distress experienced in cases of melancholia is less easy to explain. Freud suggests that the analogy with mourning can help to make instances of melancholia more intelligible: the comparison allows us to construct the idea of a ‘lost object’ within processes of melancholy. The metaphor of the ‘lost object’ can help us to account for cases where the ‘mourning’ is not for someone who has died, and also for cases where ‘one cannot clearly see what it is that has been lost’. He suggests, in addition, that in cases where this ‘loss’ is ideal rather than actual, ‘it is all the more reasonable to suppose that the patient cannot consciously perceive what he has lost either’ (p. 245). For Freud this unperceived or unconscious loss suggests a certain emptiness of the ego. He says: ‘In mourning it is the world which has become poor and empty; in melancholia it is the ego itself’ (p. 246).

Freud suggests that in mourning the ego is able to detach itself from the lost object while in melancholia the lost object is internalized and becomes a constitutive element of the ego. He describes melancholia as an acutely painful and unresolved form of mourning, associated with ‘self reproaches’, ‘self revilings’ and ‘a delusional expectation of punishment’. This attack on the self distinguishes melancholia from mourning in which, he says, ‘the disturbance of self regard is absent’ (p. 244). The self-reproaches associated with melancholia, Freud says, can frequently be understood as identifications with the loved object:

If one listens patiently to a melancholic’s many and various self-accusations, one cannot in the end avoid the impression that often the most violent of them are hardly at all applicable to the patient himself, but that with insignificant modifications they do fit someone else, someone whom the patient loves, or has loved, or should love.

(p. 248)

He concludes, ‘the self reproaches are reproaches against a loved object which have been shifted away from it on to the patient’s own ego’. Through these identifications, the features associated with the lost object are internalized by the ego, and the emotions directed at the object are turned inwards, creating a split within the ego between the internalized object and the critical emotions the ego directs at it. Freud suggests an ongoing struggle in which the ego fights both to detach from the object and also to maintain the strong emotional attachment. The ambiguity in the loved/hated nature of the lost object, and the failure to detach from the object cause of melancholia thus creates a visceral ambivalence in the relation between the object and the ego; or, to be more precise, the ambivalence persists in the relation between the internalization of the object and the other elements of the ego.

Freud summarizes this account at the end of ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, suggesting three preconditions for melancholia: ‘loss of the object, ambivalence, and regression of libido into the ego’ (p. 258). In The Ego and the Id (1923), however, Freud develops a slightly different version of the conceptual structure. He first repeats the structure he had developed in his earlier paper: ‘an object which was lost has been set up again inside the ego – that is, that an object-cathexis has been replaced by an identification’ (ibid., p. 28). Freud suggests this response to loss is far more significant than he had originally suggested. He now argues that melancholic processes play a part in the construction of the super-ego, which is instantiated in the first identifications of the subject. This simultaneous formation of the subject and the super-ego takes place during the Oedipus conflict, in which the child is forced to give up their polymorphous desire for the mother and to identify with (one of) their parents, thus taking on a sexual identity (p. 34). These identifications instantiate the influence of the parents and of wider social and moral obligations within the child: ‘The child’s parents, and especially his father, were perceived as the obstacle to a realization of his Oedipus wishes; so his infantile ego fortified itself for the carrying out of the repression by erecting the same obstacle within itself,’ (p. 34). Freud notes that this formulation constitutes a slight alteration in the conceptual structure of melancholia: ‘these identifications’, he says, ‘are not what we would have expected’ (p. 32). Instead of an internalization of the object, there is an internalisation of the prohibition of the object, and this is the basis of the super ego. This development, Freud says, begins to suggest the ‘full significance’ (p. 28) of melancholic processes and of the role they play in the formation of the ego.

There are several significant distinctions within Freud’s account. There is the distinction between a process in which the subject is able to detach from the lost object and a process in which the relation to the object is sustained, in some form, within the ego. There is the distinction between the internalization of the lost object within the ego and the internalization of the prohibition of the object. And there is the distinction between melancholia as a pathological process and melancholia as the common basis for the formation of the subject. I am drawing attention to these distinctions because it seems to me that they mark out aspects that are either foregrounded or left out when the concept of melancholia is referenced in the analysis of social identities. It is also the case that Klein’s reconceptualization of mourning/melancholia foregrounds the internalization of the object and pays less attention to the internalization of social prohibitions. Judith Butler’s account of melancholic gender, in contrast, foregrounds the relation between cultural prohibition and the simultaneous incorporation and disavowal of the lost object of homosexual love. Butler’s discussion raises questions about the finality of the social prohibition and the distinctions between the psychical mechanisms of repression, disavowal and foreclosure.

As well as developing Freud’s conceptualization of the internalization of the object, Klein introduces significant new aspects to the conceptual structure of melancholia: an earlier first instantiation of the ego, related to the absence of the mother rather than the intervention of the father; the role of the present object (the mother) in the process of production of internal objects; and the potentially reparative nature of this process. Also central to Klein’s account is the prioritization of affect and her conceptualization of the processes of internalization.

What comes first for Klein is an intensely affective primary encounter with an external world. The infant’s experiences of this world are internalized, gradually building up a parallel world of inner objects. However, this inner world is, in Klein’s words, ‘inaccessible to the child’s accurate observation and judgment’, it is the product of unconscious fantasy, ‘phantasmatic’, giving rise to ‘doubts, uncertainties and anxieties’ (1940, p. 149). The phantasmatic inner objects are overwhelming for the child, so that, for Klein, ‘every infant experiences anxieties which are psychotic in content’ (p. 150). These anxieties are dealt with by reference to the external world, which can ‘disprove anxieties’ (p. 149) and enable the child to establish ‘good’ internal objects. Thus, through a gradual process of reality checking, the infant begins to establish a less persecutory and terrifying internal world. In Klein’s terms this is the shift from the need to preserve the ego in the early, paranoid schizoid position, to the depressive position in which the infant recognizes and identifies with good aspects of the object and feels the need to preserve them.

Melanie Klein’s reinterpretation of mourning in her account of the infant depressive position foregrounds feelings of destruction and peril related to the ego’s fragile sense of its own survivability in addition to the self-reproaches, sadness and lack of self-regard given prominence in Freud’s account. Klein suggests that the depressive feelings associated with melancholia are first experienced in early infancy:

the baby experiences depressive feelings which reach a climax just before, during and after weaning. This is the state of mind in the baby which I termed the ‘depressive position’, and I suggested that it is a melancholia in statu nascendi. The object which is being mourned is the mother’s breast and all that the breast and the milk have come to stand for in the infant’s mind: namely, love, goodness and security.

(p. 148)

Pitted against these symbols of love, goodness and security are the extreme chaos and vulnerability of the infant’s world and their uncontrollable, violent and destructive anxieties. As soon as the object that represents what is good is withdrawn, it becomes the object of the infant’s fears and aggression, at the same time giving rise to guilt that the loss is a result of the infant’s own greedy and destructive impulses. Thus, the ambivalent feelings that Freud described in the relation to the object are rearticulated in Klein’s account.

The key moment for Klein is the withdrawal of the loved object, the breast, symbol of ‘love, goodness and security’. This traumatic moment is a crystallization of the child’s chaotic inner world and of the potential to develop a more ambivalent relation towards its objects: the depressive position. According to Klein, the ongoing encounters with the loved object, the mother, gradually reduce the extremities of ambivalence and develop a more stable inner representation:

All the enjoyments which the baby lives through in relation to his mother are so many proofs to him that the loved object inside as well as outside is not injured, is not turned into a vengeful person. The increase of love and trust, and the diminishing of fears through happy experiences, help the baby step by step to overcome his depression and feeling of loss (mourning).

(p. 149)

In contrast to Freud’s suggestion that we internalise the lost object, Klein’s emphasis is on the importance of the mother, a present object, in the construction of the good internal objects (see Mitchell, cited in Jukes,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: reframing psychoanalytic concepts, or bricolage decomposed
• 1. Melancholia: lost objects of national, ethnic, classed, gendered and sexual identities
• 2. Overdetermination: the conceptualization of dreams and discourse
• 3. Textures of resistance: ‘discourse’ and ‘psyche’ and ‘the compulsion to repeat’
• 4. Signifying chains in academic practice: the appearance and disappearance of affect, politics and methodology
• 5. From psychic defences to social defences: recontextualizing strategies and Klein’s theory of ego development
• 6. Conclusion: troubling attachments
• Notes
• References
• Index