Exigent Psychoanalysis

The Interventions of Jean Laplanche

Gila Ashtor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000425420
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Exigent Psychoanalysis: The Interventions of Jean Laplanche offers a bold exploration of the contemporary psychoanalytic field by focusing on key issues through the lens of one of this century's most exacting and invigorating psychoanalytic theorists.

Deliberately taking an integrative approach that spans a vast range of psychoanalytic ideas - with particular focus on the enduring tension between Freudian and Relational paradigms - Ashtor shows how a rigorous close reading of Laplanche's work can disrupt stale binaries and forge new possibilities for revolutionizing the foundations of psychoanalysis. Organized as pointed interventions on such topics as metapsychology, motivation, the unconscious and psychic structure, Ashtor integrates cutting edge research on Affect theory and sexuality to demonstrate the potential for fieldwide innovation.

Of interest to established and emerging clinicians alike and aimed at addressing a broad spectrum of theoretical positions, Exigent Psychoanalysis offers the first extensive clinical and theoretical study of Laplanche's work, thus facilitating a timely and cutting-edge intervention in contemporary psychoanalytic debates.

Chapter 1

Metapsychology – Mytho-symbolic versus metapsychology

My “witch”: the history of metapsychology

When Laplanche asks, “New foundations for psychoanalysis? Is it necessary to return to foundations? Furthermore, in what sense could they be new?” (NFP, 3) he is knowingly and deliberately calling attention to the ambiguous status of change, especially with regard to the field’s original foundations. In order to build the necessary “new foundations,” Laplanche will carefully distinguish what ought to constitute relatively immutable foundations from the range of particular theories which naturally come and go.

But before outlining Laplanche’s specific views, it is crucial to evaluate the current state of metapsychology because its notoriously tangled genealogy aptly serves as the first clue to how fraught every attempt at engaging with the field’s underlying theoretical assumptions has been. As several critics have observed, Freud himself famously referred to metapsychology as his “witch” (1937, 225) and never seems to have wavered on the centrality of metapsychology even as he struggled to locate its particular place. On the one hand, Freud seems to have believed that “without metapsychological speculation and theorizing … we shall not get another step forward” (225) and at other moments, metapsychology seems to stand for nothing other than the abstract extrapolations of observed clinical practice. Although these ideas are not necessarily at odds, Joel Kovel has correctly observed that Freud’s writing sought to strike a delicate balance between maximizing empirical investigation while preserving a set of theoretical foundations (1978, 22) and that one result of this tension is trying to ascertain which ideas qualify as metapsychological, and whether making changes to metapsychology alters clinical practice or our general theory of mind. Moreover, any debate on metapsychology necessarily encounters a set of complicated questions about the relationship between the “object” of psychoanalysis and the theories elaborated around it.

Derived from the Greek word “meta,” meaning “beyond” or “behind,” metapsychology most typically refers to a level of psychological conceptualization that organizes clinical observations. Because the psychoanalytic method of treatment, the clinical theory and the metapsychology are three parts of a unitary whole, Johann Erikson observes that “Freud himself claims that metapsychology retains a privileged position insofar as it constitutes a theoretical fundament for the other parts of psychoanalytical science. For even if the metapsychological theories are based upon clinical experiences, the ambition of these theories is no less than “to clarify and carry deeper the theoretical assumptions on which a psycho-analytic system could be founded (Freud, 1937, p. 222)” (22). In a seminal paper from 1959 that is largely credited with launching subsequent debates about the role of metapsychology in psychoanalytic theory, David Rapaport and Merton Gill begin by announcing that “at some point in the development of every science, the assumptions on which it is built must be clarified…This justifies our attempt to state explicitly and systematically that body of assumptions which constitute psycho-analytic metapsychology” (1959, 154). Claiming that a rigorous appraisal of metapsychology is aligned with Freud’s intentions, Rapaport and Gill argue that a “systematization of metapsychology is necessary, if only because the increasing use of the metapsychological points of view in the literature is often at odds with Freud’s definitions, without the authors’ justifying this or even indicating an awareness of it” (154). In order to enable such a rigorous theoretical exercise, Rapaport and Gill offer the following definition of metapsychology: “Metapsychology proper thus consists of propositions stating the minimum (both necessary and sufficient) number of independent assumptions upon which the psycho-analytic theory rests. Metapsychology also includes the points of view which guide the metapsychological analysis of psycho-analytic propositions, both observational and theoretical” (155). While they acknowledge that in everyday practice most clinicians are relatively disinterested in parsing the coherence of any particular idea they hold, he ends his paper emphatically arguing for the stakes of this endeavor – “the future development of psycho-analysis as a systematic science may well depend on such continuing efforts to establish the assumptions on which psycho-analytic theory rests” (161).

Written in technical and unsentimental academic prose, Rapaport and Gill’s paper can hardly be said to predict hardly anticipates the decades of controversy it engendered. While the call for a study of psychoanalysis’ underlying assumptions seemed sensible and straightforward, even a natural next step for a maturing scientific discipline, what ensued was a highly partisan debate about the very status of psychoanalysis as a natural science. On the one side, Rapaport’s students called for the totalizing rejection of metapsychology on the grounds that it was merely speculative pseudoscience that failed to substantively deepen clinical experience (Klein, 1976; Schafer 1976; Holt, 1981, 1989; Gill, 1976), while on the other side, ego psychologists defended metapsychology with the view that it was impossible, to separate Freud’s metapsychology from his clinical theory, and that discarding the larger claims of psychoanalysis fatally compromised the entire enterprise. Why the role of metapsychology turned into a debate about whether or not psychoanalysis was a natural science is not immediately obvious; after all, Freud was relatively clear about his intentions to ground the study of unconscious processes in available knowledge of the brain and for decades before this debate broke out, metapsychology was more or less easily understood as referring to the study of psychology’s underlying principles.

As John Gedo has observed, a confluence of forces arose in the mid-1970s that precipitated the collapse of a metapsychological consensus (1997). Since over time it became fairly evident that “Freud’s metapsychological hypothesis did not prove to have clinical relevance or predictive value” (780), they were “amended” in the work of Heinz Hartmann, Ernst Kris and David Rapaport. By 1970, Roy Schafer was the “first simultaneously to pay tribute to the heuristic value of these theoretical contributions while pronouncing them passe” and by 1976 a series of papers was published in a collection entitled “Psychology versus Metapsychology” that took aim at the persistence of metapsychology as an unjustified flight into speculative abstraction and called for psychoanalysis to limit its focus to what it knows best – mental contents as they are expressed and constructed in the clinical encounter (1976). According to this view, expressed succinctly by George Klein, “psychoanalysis does not need a theory to explain a theory, that is, a metapsychology to explain the psychology” (1988, 37). As Gill explains, “those who hold that psychoanalysis is not a natural science but a hermeneutic one believe that Freudian metapsychology employs natural-science dimensions, that these are not the dimensions of clinical theory, and that therefore metapsychology is not a generalization from the clinical theory but rather is in a different universe of discourse… It is important to recognize that this position is not atheoretical but rather holds that the clinical theory suffices” (37). A central feature of this hermeneutic position was its decisive turn away from biological science; “hermeneuticists, of course, accept the necessity for a biological science of man, too,” Gill writes, “but argue that psychoanalysis does not have the data required to build such a science” and “while they agree in principle with the idea that psychoanalytic concepts should be consistent with the findings of other sciences, they believe that hermeneutic propositions are in a different realm of discourse from natural science so that the issue of compatibility does not even arise” (43).

From the outset, there were major differences among thinkers on how best to respond to the obvious shrinkage of psychoanalytic theory. Charles Brenner rejected the argument outright, claiming that the widespread use of metapsychology to mean the logical foundations of a clinical theory are completely mistaken and that “Freud meant by 'metapsychology' the psychology of unconscious mental processes. He used the word as essentially synonymous with 'psychoanalytic psychology,' since psychoanalysis began as depth psychology and remains unique in its focus on that aspect of mental life” (1980, 212). Brenner further concluded that since “psychological phenomena are an aspect of brain functioning,” psychoanalysis is obviously a branch of natural science (212) and therefore any attempt to distinguish metapsychology from specific clinical theories “makes no sense whatsoever” (198).¹ This view didn’t preclude other ego psychologists from trying to take new biology into consideration; most notably, Hartmann actively tried to integrate modern ideas on adaptation with Freud’s original conceptualization of the ego (1958). But the emphasis for these thinkers was on integrating this new biology with Freud’s original model of the mind, tweaking things here and there while preserving the contours of his metapsychological edifice intact. Others, meanwhile, have sought to eschew biology altogether.

Schafer famously proposed the creation of an entirely new “action language” of psychoanalysis that would be deliberately a-biological and based instead on the structure of language (as developed by the English school of psycholinguistic philosophers such as Wittgenstein, Austin, and Ryle). Wishing to expunge every reference to material science on the grounds that Freud’s “mixed physicochemical and evolutionary biological language” obscures more than it reveals, Schafer instead proposes an alternative language that is grounded in “the vantage point of personal actions, and we shall neither work in terms of presuppositions about psychoeconomics of a Newtonian cast nor burden ourselves with biological commitment of a Darwinian cast to explain and guarantee the continuity of the species” (1976, 8). Emphasizing the symbolic functioning of human being, Schafer calls for a new metapsychology that enables us to “speak about people more plainly” and refrains from speculations “about what is ultimately unutterable in any form nor build elaborate theories on the basis of unfalsifiable propositions concepting mental activity at the very beginning of infancy” (10). Schafer’s attempt to rewrite psychoanalytic metapsychology along these lines has encountered extensive and impassioned criticism, much of which focused on Schafer’s total eradication of the “unconscious” as a meaningful dimension of pre-verbal experience.

In sharp contrast to Schafer’s anti-biologism, another group of thinkers has called for deepening, rather than abandoning, psychoanalysis’ reliance on biology. Less constrained by the orthodoxy of first-generation ego psychologists and having arrived onto the clinical scene after the advent of object relations theory – which promised to systematize clinical findings that were not otherwise captured by a drive-based model – these clinicians were interested in solidifying the field’s scientific credentials while also remaining acutely sensitive to the theoretical coherence of any metapsychological paradigm. In addition to calling for a metapsychology that was scientifically credible, these thinkers were also concerned with ensuring logical and technical consistency; as Rapaport had observed, while the ordinary clinician can claim to simultaneously believe in the centrality of attachment and “drives,” in philosophical terms, these different paradigms are in fact theoretically incoherent (1967). For these thinkers, who include John Gedo, John Holt, Benjamin Rubinstein, and Arnold Modell, the goal of a clinically relevant and conceptually coherent psychoanalysis necessitates scientific upgrades (more recent examples of this endeavor include Mark Solms’ “neuropsychoanalysis,” which aims to integrate current neurology first names, Michael Slavin and David Kriegman with psychoanalysis, Allan Schore’s work on affect regulation and Michael Slavin and David Kriegman’s work on evolutionary biology).

According to this view, the choice by some (i.e., hermeneuticists, often referred to as “radicals”) “to abandon the biological pretensions of psychoanalysis altogether” not only forfeits the “Freudian ambition of establishing a science of mental functions” but in its exclusive privileging of symbolic communications also fails to elucidate the dimension of experience which is “unconscious” (Gedo 1991, 5). They argue that Freud’s efforts to ground psychoanalysis on firm biological principles hit the natural limits of nineteenth-century science; it isn’t that Freud, as an individual thinker, made wrong assumptions or built a flawed theory but that he did the best he could with the knowledge he had available to him – knowledge that is, as in any science, bound to evolve over time. This position maintains that “depth psychology” is indisputably a branch of biological science because there is simply no way to theorize human behavior without some assumption about “the nature of things.” Gedo continues, “any clinical theory in psychoanalysis unavoidably uses some sort of metapsychology, despite the refusal to articulate one” (1997, 782) or in Modell has put it: “Facts … are prestructured, as it were, out of our theoretical preconceptions, out of our metapsychology. Without metapsychology we cannot begin to think” (1981, 395). For the defenders of metapsychology, it is seen as providing “elements of structure and coherence that enable us to organize the buzzing confusion of immediate clinical experience” (395), and more specifically, as Modell has argued so effectively, “Although psychoanalysis is in a certain sense a linguistic enterprise, words cannot be separated from affects and affects have unquestionably evolutionary, that is, biological significance” (397). As such, any attempt to discard metapsychology is wrong on two counts: it generates practical incoherence for the clinician and renders itself incapable of explaining the deep structure of those biopsychical phenomena it seeks to describe. For many working in this tradition, the major goal of a revised metapsychology is the construction of an updated biological framework to replace Freud’s outdated one.

Attempts to revise scientific foundations

George Klein went as far as to argue that insofar as 1950s “ego psychology” maintained Freud’s underlying model of the mind, it was only ever “an empty conceptual strategem that tried to patch over the insufficiencies of the drive-discharge model of mentation” (Gedo, 1997, 39). And in a similar vein, Robert Holt has shown that among other impossible presumptions, Freud’s conception of the nervous system is completely wrong and that as a result, numerous subsidiary concepts which rely on these principles are similarly flawed and mistaken (such as, stimulus barrier, cathexis, aim inhibition). The fact that Freud’s purely quantitative explanations for pleasure and unpleasure have been overthrown by neurochemistry has led many writers to conclude that “Freud’s overall power-engineering model of the brain has to be replaced by one based on information science” (1999, 37). In a book that is representative of efforts to bring psychoanalysis in line with contemporary scientific standards, Gedo writes: “it should be remembered that, as late as 1895, Freud made a heroic, albeit unsuccessful, effort to ground psychology scientifically through a description in terms of putative processes in the nervous system. Freud had to abandon this 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' because his understanding of neurophysiology, although completely up-to-date, was far from being equal to the task of undergirding psychology. The subsequent development of psychoanalytic theory on the basis of an entirely speculative metapsychology lacking in empirical referents was a desperate expedient – perhaps more indicative of Freud’s need to anchor his thinking within the outward forms expected of a scientific enterprise than it was heuristically useful” (1991, 4). Gedo’s description of Freud – as a scientific “hero” who strove to place his model of mental life on scientific grounds but came up against the natural limits of an as-yet underdeveloped neurophysiology – exemplifies a popular strategy among those who seek to preserve Freud’s metapsychology by modifying some of the language. These thinkers acknowledge that many of Freud’s most basic theoretical assumptions are simply not compatible with our current knowledge of evolutionary processes or the brain, but nevertheless believe that the general outline of unconscious life as Freud portrayed it remains valid and useful.

Working against orthodox interpretations which tried to preserve the literal meaning of Freud’s ideas, and against the radical “hermeneuticists” who privileged the present-day construction over any transcendental claims, these aforementioned “pragmatists” acknowledge that Freud’s original concepts cannot be credibly maintained and that new scientific upgrades are required to ensure the discipline’s legitimacy. On one level, these thinkers express a clear-eyed view of the field’s intellectual deficits and even the eagerness to challenge and replace major concepts where necessary. But while this rhetoric promised to undertake an exhaustive review of the field’s metapsychological foundations, in practice, this approach takes a concrete view of metapsychology, treating the “scientific” underpinnings as arbitrary or isolated principles that were not, in themselves, important expressions of Freud’s particular style of thought. For example, even when it is clear that Freud’s view of “psychic energy” permeated an array of concepts that cannot be easily excised from “drive” theory without capsizing the whole formulation, the emphasis is repeatedly placed on how to better describe what Freud meant rather than to wonder what Freud’s particular “mistakes” reveal about his theoretical imagination. In one of the most rigorous appraisals of Freud’s scientific assumptions, Don Swanson’s 1977 paper draws on research in physics and biology to demonstrate that “psychic-energy, libido, and related concepts in Freud’s drive-discharge theory are either impossible, useless or mistaken“, and he challenges the notion, maintained by many writing on this topic, that Freud’s “mistaken” ideas can be neatly contained to a particular theoretical concept or discrete writing period (1977, 630).² After showing that Freud’s wrong ideas about psychic energy were consistent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Innovation and deviation in psychoanalysis
• 1 Metapsychology – Mytho-symbolic versus metapsychology
• 2 Sexuality – Laplanche’s theory of the unconscious
• 3 Seduction – Laplanche’s theory of psychic structure
• 4 Translation – Laplanche’s theory of motivation
• Index